Exits and Entrances: An Independence Day Pastoral
Travel Stories: Amerikanetz Joel Deutsch joins immigrants from the former Soviet Union for a Fourth of July picnic in Los Angeles
Now the skewered chunks of shashlik meat sizzle aromatically on the grill, and new side dishes, including a green salad and roasted potatoes straight from the coals, are put out to augment the others. More sodas are poured, more cans of beer popped. And interspersed with other conversation, come some of the familiar, inevitable questions about life in America, Southern California more particularly.
Grisha is my interrogator du jour. He wants me to decode the promiscuous amiability of public encounters, where complete strangers act as if they like you before they even know your name, and then toggle off the too-ready smile as soon as the transactional moment is over.
“You turn around and they look completely different,” he says. “Like someone with a split personality.”
“Those people at the mall have nothing either for you or against you,” I assure him. “And they don’t really have fraudulent intentions.”
“Then why do they behave this way?” Grisha asks. “To me, it is very insincere. It makes me nervous.”
I propose that may be just the grim centuries of well-learned Russian skepticism and prudence butting up against the tacit American social agreement to greet each other with displays of good cheer and good will, any troubled thoughts suppressed and natural reticence concealed, lest offense be inadvertently given or some chance of friendship, love, or profit, however slim, be discouraged, swept away forever in the fast waters of our hit-and-run life in the agora.
“Okay,” says Grisha. “I see what you mean.” Possibly he accepts my explanation, probably he doesn’t. But now he wants to talk about the arts.
“Tell me this,” he goes on, as I tear into the delicious shashlik, “where are the real films, the real plays?” I grab a piece of Armenian bread. “And where are the poets that people will fill up a stadium to hear them read?”
As I’m eating, I explain that, though the clamorous marketing of blockbuster productions tends to obscure the rest, we have our thoughtful movies, and, in the theater, our own Chekhovs, not to mention our Mamets and Shepards, as well. I do concede that we have no single poet as widely known as Yevtushenko once was, but then probably, I think to myself, neither does the new Russia, half asphyxiated in its democratic incubator by a miasma of brain-candy mass culture.
Abruptly, the inquest leaves off, like an outworn protocol dutifully or compulsively fulfilled, as if Grisha is actually tired of asking such questions, whether or not the responses he gets really satisfy him. For now, enough is enough, and we abandon our self-appointed diplomatic posts to enjoy the food and the company and the pleasure of a sweet, free summer day.
After awhile, the men get up a game of cards called preferans, while some of the women spread blankets on the grass for conversation. I slide over next to Dima for a look, but all I can figure out about the game is that it involves three or four players, and whoever deals has to sit out that hand and keep score. Preferans is such an institution, explains Dima, that it has its own universe of jokes, slang, and proverbs, much like poker in that respect but otherwise more strategically complex and less dependent on luck, as is clear from the web-like graph on which negative and positive points are recorded. Dima returns his attention to the game, and I, as if watching a foreign film without subtitles, space out pleasantly, lulled by the impenetrable phonetics of the men’s card-table repartee.
During the course of the afternoon, another crew has arrived and begun playing softball on the park’s diamond, filling the air with excited shouts. I try to imagine what they must sound like to Russian ears, their voices almost barbed with confidence, so relentlessly major key, all those flattened vowels, all those utilitarian consonants devoid of gutturals or trills, the pitch rising at the ends of declarative statements as if to file down the rough edges.
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