Russian Tattoo (14 page)

Twenty-Two

M
y ESL students are from Ecuador, Peru, Venezuela, and Colombia. They are from Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. They come from countries whose names I have heard only on a TV travel show in Leningrad, exotic names that our Cyrillic alphabet twists and mangles, trying to tame them to a Slavic pronunciation. For me, these names evoke the humid jungle we only knew from Kipling's books, with panthers and pythons and parrots the colors of nursery school crayons. Many students are from Cuba, the only country name our Russian language has no problem with, phonetically. Cuba is simple, a name we've all heard in the news since childhood, two syllables requiring a single breath.

Before my first class at Hudson College the only Cuban I had met was Roxana, the unauthorized, un-Indian girlfriend of our Austin roommate. Thinking of Roxana takes me back to Texas, which instantly resurrects Robert and the sense of guilt scratching in the back of my head, like an ungrateful cat. I try to carve him out of my mind, the way I used to cut white circles of fat out of
kolbasa
slices back home, but my mental knife lacks sharpness and precision, botching up the boundaries, jolting and lurching in my uncertain hand. I wonder if Robert is in Austin, or in Princeton; I wonder what happened to Roxana and Sagar and the suitcase full of Kodak brides my former roommate's mother lugged across the ocean.

“I'm sorry I'm not going to meet your mother,” I told Sagar when I said good-bye to him in Austin.

“Can I please come to New Jersey with you?” he asked with a sad chuckle. “Maybe I'll be able to escape, too.”

I look at the strange names on my ESL class roster: Ascanio, Irlanda, Leidy, Jafet. But the oddest name is also the most familiar, a first name that belongs to a skinny twenty-one-year-old man from Cuba. My tongue freezes for a moment before wrapping around its sound—so melodic because it intones the name of the great Siberian river the founder of our Soviet state adopted for his pseudonym while hiding from the tsarist police, so close to the sound of my own name.

Lenin Rodriguez does not like to speak. He sits in the last row, his head down, the hood of his sweatshirt hovering over his eyes. When I call on him, he answers reluctantly, as if each word were a boulder he had to push up the slope of his throat.

“Come on, Lenin,” I nudge him. “If you don't speak in English, you'll never learn it.” In addition to teaching grammar and vocabulary, I do a bit of cheerleading. In my own English classes we had to sit with our arms folded on the desk as the teachers towered over us, erect as statues of the real Lenin, denouncing our stupidity and lack of diligence, threatening everyone with
dvoika,
a failing grade, in both behavior and English verb tenses. Only the Cuban Lenin doesn't respond to my motivational attempts, not showing a sliver of appreciation for my total lack of Soviet severity and discipline.

I wish Lenin would open his mouth today of all days because in the back row of my classroom sits Marlin Tomkins, the director of the ESL Program, dressed in a navy suit and tie as formal as his title. He is writing up my first evaluation to be filed in my Hudson College personnel dossier, which will be available to every director and dean curious about the level of my teaching skill. Between the vigorous scribblings on his yellow legal pad, Marlin turns his head right and left, his watery eyes behind thick lenses examining my students as if through fish tank glass. I should concentrate on my class's second language acquisition by teaching the simple present tense in a meaningful context, but my eyes keep returning to the director, to his expressionless eyes and his upper lip protruding over a receding chin. Instead of thinking about grammatical rules and pedagogical strategies, I wonder if Marlin knows how well he fits his name.

“He no like speak,” says Altagracia, who always sits in the front and who likes to speak for herself and everyone else. She is Colombian, short and sturdy as a fireplug, the age Lenin's mother would be. About once a week she passes out sweet
pasteles
with guava jam during break time, making sure that there are enough left when the tray gets to the last row. “He come here two month ago, in boat,” she says, volunteering bits of Lenin's story. “Three days in ocean. Very bad.”

“No, no boat.
Balsa
,” interrupts Marisol, an Ecuadorian girl from the second row, who draws a gaze from every male in our college hallways. “Golden Latina,” they whisper, as she sashays past them on her long legs. Marisol's amber eyes are expertly lined to make them look even bigger, and her skin is the color of the café con leche I get during the break at a little grocery store across the street from our school. “Like what car has,” she says, drawing a circle in the air with her hands, as the rest of the students chime in with half-English-half-Spanish versions of what mode of transportation Lenin used to travel from Cuba to the United States. Marisol turns in a calculated motion that makes her blond curls fall across her face, graciously accepting vocabulary help from her classmates. “Tires,” she repeats, looking at me, providing an explanation. “Car tires together like a raft. Three days in ocean on car tires.”

I wonder what Lenin thinks about Altagracia and Marisol and everyone else in the room volunteering the story of his escape from Cuba on a tire raft. All the eyes in the room are on Lenin now except the director's. He is staring at Marisol, at her café con leche shoulders bared by a sundress, and there is a little human curve in his fish mouth, a smile of admiration for such preternatural beauty.

I can't see Lenin's eyes from under the hood, but I discern a new softness in his posture, as if the boulders have lightened in his throat. His body is half-turned toward Marisol—toward the golden luminosity of her face—in an almost fragile, unprotected way. Maybe he feels relieved that the students have released the story that has been caged up for two months in the darkness under his hood. Maybe he is grateful that the most beautiful woman in Hudson College has molded her cinnamon lips around the words that explain his harsh arrival in this country. I am glad that Marlin is here to listen to this emerging story, to witness its coming out.

I try to imagine the stormy ocean at night, with blasts of wind and waves and pounding rain—which makes me think of Aivazovsky's sea paintings in the Leningrad Russian Museum, huge canvases full of furious white foam and tiny ships perched on walls of swollen water. I try to imagine a raft made of car tires lashed together by ropes, Lenin and the others clutching the black rubber rims not to be swept into the angry sea. Are they sitting shoulder to shoulder, holding on to one another? Are they lying facedown, their backs to the salty deluge, fused to the rubber surface like leeches to skin, sensing with an animal acuity that one of them has just been washed away into the roaring blackness? How many people piled onto that raft in the humid darkness of a Cuban night, I wonder, and how many stepped onto the beach in Florida three days later?

I know I should stop looking at Marlin staring at Marisol or imagining the stormy ocean between Cuba and Florida and instead present the ESL director with a well-planned and professionally executed lesson based on the latest theories of second language acquisition. But I know it will be impossible to extract a word out of Lenin in front of all the students, especially with a stranger looming in the back row, so I decide to break my class up and have them work in small groups. It is a daring move since I have never tried this technique before, but the ultimate goal of teaching is to engage every single student, even those who recently arrived here on a raft made of nothing but tires.

I match weaker students with stronger ones, reticent tongues with those more fluid. I ask Marisol and Altagracia to move to the back row to work with Lenin as I distribute to my class a picture to discuss and describe in writing. It is a picture of an airport terminal I copied from an ESL dictionary this morning—such an absurdly fast and riskless way to travel.

“Would you like to join one of the groups?” I ask Marlin, hoping that he accepts my bold offer, that this audacity does not demolish my future at Hudson College. For a second Marlin hesitates, but this is the precise moment when Marisol lifts her eyes and parts her lips in a smile aimed directly at him, the moment that certifies he is still a human being, despite his stern director's suit and his fish tank gaze.

I walk around the class, helping my students with the words they don't know, correcting their grammar. But my eyes and ears are attuned to the group in the back, where Altagracia points to something in the picture and Marlin adjusts his glasses and explains. The four of them are sitting in a small circle, Marlin between Altagracia and Lenin, his eyes bright behind the lenses, his face animated by the proximity to Marisol but also, I'd like to think, to so many unimaginable stories.

When I look at them again, after another walk around the room, I hear Marisol saying something to Lenin in rapid but soft Spanish, her gold earrings swaying with her speech cadence. I am just about to chide her for not speaking English in an ESL class when she gently touches the hood of Lenin's sweatshirt and lifts it off his forehead. Lenin's eyes are big and surprised, the color of a midday sea lit by the sun. He doesn't resist or pull his hood back down, but then who could protest the touch of this glowing Latina?

I glance at the clock on the wall. Only two minutes are left until the end of the class, and I hastily collect the papers with the students' airport terminal descriptions, hoping that in his evaluation Marlin won't take points off for my inadequate time management. He shakes the hands of all three students in his group, his face serious and cold, back to the director's face again. Then he collects his briefcase and his legal pad and walks over to the teacher's desk, where I am standing, having just realized that I've forgotten to assign the homework.

“I'll write it up within a day or two,” he says, nodding at the legal pad under his arm. “I have a couple of suggestions, but on the whole, it was an exhilarating class.”

I don't know the word
exhilarating,
but it can't be too negative, I think. It bursts with the energy of an
x
and an
r,
and the
t
at the end pops into the air with one bold, vigorous jolt.

On the way home, after the class, I think that the next time I see Lenin, in two days, I will ask him to write about his experience on the tire raft in English. I will ask Altagracia and Marisol to help him. I think of my own trip here, exactly a year ago: an Aeroflot stewardess in a fur hat moving down the aisle with trays of roasted chicken and rice, a dish I had seen only at the faculty cafeteria when I taught Russian to American students the summer I met Robert. I think of the ten hours in the sky, gawking from my seat at the frozen vastness of Greenland, instead of three hellish days and nights on a tire raft tossed in the black ocean like a shred of debris from a passing cruise ship. I don't know what people clinging to old tires think about when it becomes clear that in this dark gamble the ocean is going to claim its share, that some who started the trip will never see their destination. Did this realization daunt Lenin and his raft mates? Or had their fear already reached the human limit, leaving them only to hold tight and try to breathe and clutch at something, anything, no matter what it was?

One week after Marlin's observation of my class, on my one-year anniversary of living in this country, Andy takes me to a Spanish restaurant in North Bergen, where the menu bristles with new words:
mariscada, paella, frittata, sangria.
Twenty minutes later, half the unfamiliar dishes, it seems, are placed in front of me, mussels and clams in a cast-iron pot steaming with briny aroma, mounds of yellow rice studded with smoked sausage spilling over the lip of a huge plate. It's Spanish from Spain, Andy lets me know so that I don't run and ask my Colombian student Altagracia for a recipe, although I have a sense that she could make a formidable
mariscada.
Altagracia, I think, would know how to make a culinary masterpiece out of almost anything. Andy has ordered a pitcher of sangria, which turns out to be a drink, red and sweet and full of drunken apple slices.