OTHERNURSE

OLGA LIVSHIN

“Contrary to Soviet propaganda, Americans are a kind people. They are approachable, friendly, and willing to help. You must not stand very close to Americans. They will need some distance from you.”
— Textbook for future Jewish refugees from the Soviet Union, published by the Jewish Family Service, 1991

*

My father and I are at the beach in San Diego. This is where we landed, leaping out of Moscow a year before. I am in high school. We had gone on a short hike and ended up by the ocean.
The evening is light, secluded, shielded by the setting sun. You can put this light on, easily, like a good pair of sandals; that’s what the tourists do.
I need to go to the bathroom. While I use the Port-a-Potty, Dad waits outside. I hear someone faintly playing the drums in the distance.
I come out and see my father, normally humorous and composed, looking frightened. He says, Let’s walk quickly. I ask my father what is going on, but he won’t say. I look back, behind the PortaPotty, and see a drum circle: young men with goatees, your typical surfing lyrical dudes. My dad looks at them. They are the ones who terrified him.
No need to worry, I say; they are some guys, probably meditating to their music. Oh, he says, relieved. I thought it was some kind of ritual, perhaps a dangerous one.

*

That day, I am able to explain a little bit of America for the first time.
I can translate it for him.
My father’s terror and melancholy over the world that had gone illegible when he immigrated: that night, I can make it go away.

*

My dad has a job now. He works for the Jewish Family Service.
My mom says: See? Things are getting better for us.
Dad’s department is called Resettlement.
I think Dad could be God if he wanted to. Resettlement sounds like a very mighty English word: poetic yet resolute.
The people Dad speaks to at work speak Russian. They come and go, they are loud. Mostly Jewish. Some are Bukharan Jews, and they look more like Iranians like me. Others are Ashkenazi like us: Ashkenazi are apparently people like us.
I didn’t know there are so many kinds of Jewish people. Some people my dad helps are also native Russians, and they are funny and brash.
All these people need my father.

*

My dad isn’t learning English. I translate and translate for him.
My mom speaks pretty good English now. I translate for my dad. At the doctor’s, at the mechanic’s, at the other doctor’s, at the dentist’s. We drive around town with the windows down to save money on air conditioning, and go to offices where I translate.
Dad doesn’t seem to get
that the end product of my translating
is helping him feel better,
body and soul—
—this, I believe, would make me feel better.

At the long supply chain of kindness, I am the secret customer.

*

There is also a different kind of translating.
one that’s for me.

Sitting on the floor in our apartment,
I translate into English
poetry by my favorite
rebellious
visionary
performance poet.
My father knew her back in Moscow.

I sit on the floor, my back against the cheery green
couch donated by the Jewish Family Service
and laugh as I scribble with a savage appetite:

...I dreamed of the president
on my bed.
My family sat around and admired him lying there...
The president said sagely:
Googoo, gaagaa...

I am alone in the apartment
but not quite.
The poet is there. Nina Iskrenko.
I get up and dance with the invisible Iskrenko,
holler out a diabolical laugh.

Iskrenko exists in these layers of letters that I get to wear
like an invisibility cloak.

*

Some days, translating for my dad or myself means being able to understand enough right-
English despite the hum and howl of not-quite-right in your ear.
The not-quite-right is an ocean. It overflows, drowning out the yes-please.
The radio needs to know:
Who do you need? Who do you love? When d’you come on down?
In a different song, the radio wails:
And I pray! Oh my God, do I pray... But there’s nothing I can do that totally clings to my heart.

*

My father now understands who Born Again Christians are and why they knock on our door every few days.
He says politely:
Thank you, but I am not interesting—
It’s “interested,” Dad—

He tells me, I would very much like to learn,
but I can tell he isn’t learning.
And I want to know why.

*

To settle:
1: to furnish with inhabitants: COLONIZE; 2: to establish or secure permanently;
3: to make quiet or orderly.
— Merriam-Webster

*

I translate:
in order to make someone quiet or orderly, you must first furnish
a real
inhabitant.

Someone who lives permanently
in America, who has a habit for her, that kind, friendly land.

You must nurture them in- to a soft, easy habit.
Like sitting on furniture.

To make someone quiet, or orderly, .
you must first settle them.

*

I make a phone call
to a private school.
A Russian-Jewish girl went there, I’ve heard,
on a scholarship.

When someone answers the phone, I say:
I want to go to school at you.
I hear a pause,
followed by a woman’s voice saying very slowly and very deliberately:
We are a strictly private institution.
I speak right back—very thoughtfully, I believe—
But I know you have scholarships, and I want one.

I get the scholarship. I get another scholarship after that, for summer camp.
I translated myself
correctly: America loves a go-getter.

When I spoke those first words,
But I know you have scholarships,
it was like hearing somebody else
say such a thing out loud.

*

My first book on meditation, by Jon Kabbat-Zinn,
is called
Wherever You Go, There You Are.

I sure hope so.

My parents bought the book for me as a birthday gift.
They don’t quite get what the fuss is about.
My mom comes in and
I am on the floor, staring.

Every meditation that I am
a lake,
a mountain
(illustrated by a small, delicate drawing)

every English word in that book, an edge
on the edge of a separate river, flowing,
where I wish to go—

brings me a little closer to being myself
wherever I go.

*

Perhaps my dad could possibly make himself a little bit better by learning some English? My dad does not want to learn English beyond the little bit he knows.
He says: It would be very nice to know it, maybe I could say some polite things, but—

*

Translating can also mean,
in theory,
liking the not-quite-right English.

The small group of Russian kids at school do.
They speak accented English
mix English with Russian
Russian with English

curse words with lunch.

This is a different way of being, one I have trouble
translating to myself.

I am—apparently—a purist.
Even though when my teacher calls me a purist,

I don’t know what that is.

*

My dad is the one who taught me how to write poetry (in Russian, of course; because my brand- new American friends ask me); ancient Greek myths on our walks (in Russian, of course); and all the science he had learned back when he harbored the hope to get into medical school in Odessa, but was not allowed, as a Jew.

Yes, of course that was in Russian. Why “of course”? Aren’t you Jewish?

*

The sea of English. There it is, right there. Can’t you see, Dad? Jump in.

*

Who do you love?

What does it take
to hear poetry in the everyday struggle-mangled

limber language?

*

Instead of love, something else fills me.
I get to go to the mall. I get to stay out in the darkness, speaking English with my nice friends from the private school. I listen to Gipsy Kings. Once I even drank a screwdriver with a friend. I must be a bad daughter. At sixteen or seventeen, I should know better how to be a... young adult.
What am I missing?

*

Then he loses his job.
And then I insist he go to community college to learn English. And he does.

And, at fifty-nine,
he is the best student in class.

*

I have — apparently — successfully parented my own father.
Look at him going off on his own into the world!

And I go off into mine,
into college on the other coast,

wherever I go, there I hope to be. *

Dad makes jokes in English!
He writes my mom a short poem in English! It rhymes!

By now, I’ve lived in Boston, found Russian-Jewish friends,

found ease.

The price is leaving him behind.
But he’s not doing bad, is he?
...Let’s go to the mountains, let’s go to the sea! I found you these flowers.
Artificial? Uh, merci? ...

My mom reads me the poem on the phone.
She says he read it to some people at a work party!
Americans laughed!
Actual Americans, she notes.
Actual Americans. I note.

*

Sophomore year. First
boyfriend-with-a-capital-A.
Sweet indecency. His Russian accent
squishes the word juices
into joo-sies.

That makes me feel pity and superiority
and arousal.

*

Mom calls to say: your
dad didn’t take your leaving kindly.
He has depression.

*

In a graduate translation seminar, where I should not
be, an undergrad,
though I translate myself right in,
among grandiloquent MFA students old enough to be my aunts,

I attempt to translate
a line from Latin into English,
and make a mistake in English
that is just too-much-not-quite-right.

How high rises that mountain, meaning tall and not high.

The not-really-aunts snicker: high rises.
Say: we do not use inversions in English.
The worst part was that I knew this—
how did I slip into my Russian reverie?

My mentor defends me, lashes out:
Olga came to the US just four years ago,
here she is in our seminar, and this is how you treat her?

*

To love, to be loved.

That night, in my dorm single,
my boyfriend squashed into my
bachelorette bed, spooning me,
I wake up with a sweat, wake
him up, begin arguing:

I should not be here,
or anywhere.

I cannot calm myself down.
I should not be here. I don’t
know what that means, but
I repeat it.

I try to be my own parent
and talk myself out of it. That does not work.

I ask my boyfriend to be a dad to me.

For five minutes?
Don’t freak out, you freak, he says,

I’m tired of you freaking out.

He leaves.

Shh—I say, not
at all sleepy in my dorm room.

*

In another class,
I learn this word: the other.

This is a useful concept.

But this quiet storm I am in,
this being inside of the other,
what is it called in English?

*

My professor emails me
a day later to check on me.
I hope you are not discouraged, she says.

The words stay with me
for life,
tucked into a pocket in my heart.

*

At 22, I am translating Russia, rather than America: I am in grad school
for Russian literature, and I better be good at it,
because it’s my native language.
I can go back and forth. I am bilingual.

This academia thing gives me a reason to belong.

My father and I are going to Moscow, for the first time
since we left.

A travel grant, I proudly tell him on the phone.
Full funding.

My father is going to introduce me to some poets I can interview for my research.
The research is about Iskrenko,
that poet I had been translating ever since we immigrated.

But what I’m happiest about
is that my dad will get to be an authority figure
for someone
one more time.

*

Before we leave, I buy my first cell phone. Texting is fun.
Slippery fingers type — otherness.
It comes out as othernurse.

*

Moscow stuns us with good theater.
It’s incredibly hot and loud in July.
There are women on the subway who now look quite naked to me; they seem to be wearing fishnets instead of tank tops.
I interview the first of several poets I would talk to during this trip.
It’s at a cool basement-level cafe.

We are discussing Iskrenko,
recently deceased. The man in front of me is in his fifties, his eyes whitish like the underbelly of a fish.
They go up and down my body.

The poet says: “You see, we needed our readers; and she was willing to perform for rich Moscow Jews. But I wouldn’t stoop that low.”

My father is in the bathroom. When he returns,
we spend another hour talking. The poet
has brought me a letter from Iskrenko.
He wants to photocopy it for me. The nearest
photocopier is at the central post office,
a long, hot walk away. We trudge
down the dusty boulevard, farther and farther
from Iskrenko my love,
and my father asks the poet endless questions.
I want to go home and hide.

*

On the way back, during liftoff from Moscow, my dad turns to me and sighs: “I’m so happy we’re going back.”

*

On that plane ride, I come out to him: I really
actually
have a crush on a young woman

back in the US.
My best friend. I haven’t told her. But I believe this is called
really called

in English really
this word

bisexual.

I wait. My dad says nothing. So? I am thinking.
So??

That’s great, Olga. That’s so exciting.
I am so glad you told me.

We should go out for a drink,
and we will.
I wish we could leave the airplane right now and sit on a cloud
and drink beer

although unfortunately we cannot.

*

Otherness lingers in the air like—
like what?
There are so many kinds.
Like the little bit of car exhaust in the Moscow air that attacks your lungs, marks your body as foreign—immediately. Unleaded gas.

Like the absence of car exhaust in San Diego: salty, steamy pure air.
You come out of the airport terminal and it envelops you, then lets you go.

Like the absent expression in the eyes of my best friend, when I tell her I am in love with her:

there is no translation for any of this, not even for her rejection—
taken for granted—
in our native language.

*

The plank-strong, rope-strong hug. A woman who loves me back.

The way people look and look at us,
right there in the street
as she holds me like I’d never been held before — strongly,
giving me the strength I crave—
they do not understand,
it cannot be translated,

and that’s fine with me—

because look what I have— she lifts me up into the sky— and carefully sets me down.

*

My mom calls me to say:

We were at the movies. We watched Chuck and Larry. About two guys who lie that they’re gay to get benefits. Your dad protested and made us walk out.

He said
they’re not really bi-sek-shoo-awl

and this film is offensive. *

Seeing your people, yet not really seeing. Not knowing they are called my people. Thinking they have to be Russian. Or American. Or Russian-American. Or—

*

On the phone, my mom and I talk about my dad. He is not happy. Not quite just-right. He acts as if he is disabled.

How are you?
How am I?
My balance of Russia to America, that PhD in Attempted Happiness, it didn’t quite work. All the professors are postmodern, sharp-tongued.
American.
I turned out to be quite the Russian Romantic.
There is no translation, as it turns out.

I want to quit.

My mom thinks I should keep going.
My dad thinks I should drop out and live my life. You’re not seventy-five, he says, with anger.

He is in his sixties. I’m twenty-five.
I keep going.

*

Maybe, I think, it’s my future partner who will make me feel I belong somewhere. Someday he comes along. The man I love.
Well. He happens to be a man.
As queer as me.

My ex-girlfriend approves, says he is an honorary lesbian.

*

My American honorary lesbian and I love each other so much. We talk
so much. I start speaking like a local. No more inversions.

This American English:
I make love to it in words; I write poetry now. It is smooth, and nude, and delicious
in my mouth.

*

But sometimes, still,
as I walk, lugging groceries to my home with a teddy-bear couch and the person I love, whose language is both trustworthy and learnable,
waiting for me, surrounded by a cat and so many books—

the fear of being not-right, of not being in-the-right knocks against my teeth.

*

There once was a flood. One man sat on the roof of his house and prayed for salvation. A lifeboat came up to him, and the captain invited him to get into the boat.

“Oh no,” said the man. “I believe my God will save me.”
Soon the man heard the roar of a helicopter above him. Someone lowered the ladder for him. “No,” shouted the man. “God will save me!”
Soon the water hid the roof and the man drowned. When he appeared before God, he asked: “Why did you forsake me, my Lord? I believed you would save me?
God answered:
“I sent a boat for you—you did not want to be saved.
Then I sent a helicopter, you refused again.
Why are you so unhappy?”

—a Russian joke. Perhaps Jewish. (Should it matter?)

*

One day, in therapy, I hear the words:

The only person who can make you feel safe in the world is yourself.

It seems like a cliche.
Something out of a children’s book.

Unachievable.

*

On the first anniversary of my father’s death, I am with my friend L., an Ashkenazi Jew.
We drive and drive around the neighborhood where she grew up, raised by her grandparents, immigrants from the Russian empire.
Whenever L. brought up something that made her sad, her grandma would say, spitting three times over her shoulder: “Pfft! God bless America.”
We had planned on this personalized tour of her hometown
for weeks. It is only a coincidence
that my dad passed away a year ago.

L. drives and talks,
she tells me the story of each former movie theater, each former kosher deli.

I am really glad that we are here on this day.

*

This is still an immigrant neighborhood, except now
filled with folks from Syria, and Iraq, and the Congo.
They walk down the street, without cars yet, like my family in those first years,
and they look tired. I still feel tired.

I don’t have to pretend.

I belong in this passenger seat, this car, this neighborhood.

*

Tired of driving, L. and I pick up snacks at the big Russian store.

As a young woman, L. sought out her Russian-Jewish roots through writing. But she was forced to assimilate, to sound Anglo, to write in particular ways.

It is L.’s first time in such a big... kosher deli, she says?

No longer deli, but emporium of toffee and smoked fish and dark bread.

And to L.—revelatory.

“What is this candy?” she shouts. “It has a lobster on the wrapper. Lobsters! No, it doesn't have lobsters? Of course not.

“What is this candy? Bird milk. What is Bird milk?! In paradise, even birds have special milk. I see. I want the bird milk.

“I want kitty candy. You’ve mentioned a piece of candy with a black kitty on it. Iris Kis-Kis. This candy contains camels. Karakum? Is that how you read it? Zefir. This one contains a breeze, Olga!”

I smile. I watch L., twirling in the candy aisle.

“This is patriotic chocolate, L. don’t buy it!” I echo her. “Look at it. It has a red star on it. Don’t support it!”

“We are like girls cutting school,” L. says, out of breath. “My husband is at work.”

“My son is at school!”

“Your son is at school. Your dad has passed. And we’re like, What is this candy?”

The babushki are eyeing us glumly. This is childhood. I hold hands with my kindergartener, 60- something, beautiful friend.

*

L. is excited to find clues about her ancestors, their possible favorite sweets; herself.

This big store is a small, green shoot end for her, jutting up from the roots hidden in the dry soil.

I am giddy at my ability to guide her,
to translate for her, knowing
that finding the right words is not the goal.

It is a process, a long, tiresome walk that I wish would never end.

Translation.

Neither from Russian to English, or vice versa;

nor from a culture;
not from a map to a map,

but from joy,
belonging to both,
resplendent and varied,
more joy.

Olga Livshin lives outside Philadelphia with her tomato plants, raspberry bushes, and humans. A poet and writer, she translates Russian-language poets from Russia and Ukraine. Her work appears in the Kenyon Review, Massachusetts Review, Poetry International, Gyroscope, and other journals. A Life Replaced: Poems and Translations from Anna Akhmatova and Vladimir Gandelsman was published by Poets & Traitors Press in 2019.