by
Elif Batuman
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From the top of the escalator, all of Filene’s was spread out below you, like some historical tapestry. Then you were in it. As far as the eye could see, shoppers were fighting over cashmere sweater sets, infants’ party dresses, and pleated chinos, with a primal hostility that seemed to threaten the very bourgeois values embodied by those garments. A heap of thermal long underwear resembled a pile of souls torn from their bodies. Women were clawing through the piled souls, periodically holding one up in the air so it hung there all limp and abandoned.
Hannah spent the night in the infirmary. I slept for fourteen hours. [...]
(her roommate who snores)5
“Ivan,” I said. “Finally, we meet.”
“That’s true,” he said.
Then neither of us said anything.
“Ivan,” said Irina. “Don’t you have something to tell Nina?”
“Well,” he said. He looked at the floor and then looked at me. Lines appeared on his forehead. “I have a wife,” he said. “And it’s not you.”
I knew it wasn’t real—I knew it was just a story. But my stomach sank, my breath caught in my throat, a wave of nausea rose in my chest. I realized I had been hoping to hear a justification—like that he was a spy, or was escaping from being framed for a crime he didn’t commit. I had been hoping to hear his marriage was a sham.
[...] Père Goriot’s previous owner, Brian Kennedy, had systematically underlined what seemed to be the most meaningless and disconnected sentences in the whole book. Thank God I wasn’t in love with Brian Kennedy, and didn’t feel any mania to decipher his thoughts.
We had to act out the beginning of “Nina in Siberia,” explaining our actions and thoughts aloud, using the maximum number of grammatical structures. I hadn’t prepared at all, but felt incredibly, unprecedentedly fluent. “Now I have to talk to Ivan’s father,” I said. “Great. He doesn’t like me. He’s never liked me. I know just what he’ll say, in a gloomy voice: ‘God alone knows.’ Oh, that’s how it always is with me.”
The professors laughed. I realized that everyone in the room was sympathetic with Nina, with her objective situation, which was so abnormal and so bad. Within the world of the story, nobody mentioned or acknowledged that things were abnormal, and so one tended to accept them unquestioningly. But if you pointed out the abnormality—if you could just state it factually—people in the real world would recognize it and laugh.
[...] I had chosen a ten-point font, both to conserve paper and to discourage people from reading the story, which I didn’t think they would enjoy. Even though I had a deep conviction that I was good at writing, and that in some way I already was a writer, this conviction was completely independent of my having ever written anything, or being able to imagine ever writing anything, that I thought anyone would like to read.
It turned out that the theory of meaning that would work best for the Martians was a “theory of truth” that gave the truth conditions for every sentence. The solution would look like a series of propositions having the form, “‘Snow is white’ is true iff snow is white.” The professor wrote this sentence on the board during nearly every class. Outside the window, snow piled deeper and deeper.
In Russian class, nobody cared about truth conditions. We all said, “I have five brothers.”
I sat at one of the computers. Dear Ivan, I typed.
I have been teaching ESL for community service. Instead of “The paper is white,” this guy says “Papel iss blonk.” I understand, because I was there when he invented it. But as far as teaching English goes, I’ve failed. I am now the interpreter of a language that only he and I can understand. It makes me so tired, even angry. Why should I have to figure it out? Why don’t any messages come to me clearly?
every time i read that it makes me laugh
When I woke up again, it was snowing. I had slept through Russian. It was time for the philosophy of language. The same pale words, “Snow is white” is true iff snow is white, were written on the board for about the hundredth time. The class mechanically turned to look out the window.
Winter drew to a close. Gray dull snowbanks began melting to reveal all kinds of half-frozen garbage. The air smelled of dirt. You were always tripping over dead birds. Daffodils came up, just in time to be crippled by a late snowfall, which turned immediately into slush.
eerily similar to my own description of snow