by
Elif Batuman
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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
Ralph and I went to the student center to study for midterms. He was reading an econ textbook and I was studying psycholinguistics. Every time I looked up, I caught the eye of Ham from Constructed Worlds, who was sitting at a nearby table with three other guys.
After a few minutes, Ham came to our table.
“You seem pretty interested by that book,” he said. “What’s it about?”
I tipped it up to show the cover, which was purple and said LANGUAGE in big white letters.
“Man, do I hate language,” Ham said. “If I had it my way, we would all just grunt.”
“If we all did that, the grunting would become a language.”
“Not the way I would do it.”
“Really,” I said.
In reply he made some kind of noise.
Helen, the fiction editor, was petite and cute, with a down-to-earth manner. I could see she wanted me to like her, and I did like her. Without knowing how to demonstrate it through any speech act, I towered over her mutely, trying to project goodwill.
Over lunch, Lakshmi from the literary magazine told me about the preoccupying problem of her life. The preoccupying problem of her life was a boy. He was a senior, like Ivan. Lakshmi and I tried to discuss our shared plight, but the things that happened to us were so different that they barely seemed comparable or commensurable. Noor was from Trinidad and studied literature and economics. He was into theory. Every weekend, Lakshmi went out with him and his friends to clubs or raves—institutions I couldn’t begin to imagine, architecturally or in any other way—where they did ecstasy and talked about postcolonialism and deconstruction. Sometimes Lakshmi would black out and wake up in Noor’s bed, though nothing ever happened. “Nothing happened, of course,” she would say, in a rueful tone that seemed to imply that this outcome was somehow to Noor’s credit.
I could see that my stories made as little sense to Lakshmi as hers did to me. The emails, the walking around, the burial of strawberries. Lakshmi said that I must have been leaving something out.
“For you to assume I’m so heartbroken,” I said. “It is presumptuous.”
“Yeah, I get it.” He sighed. “My friend Imre said I was behaving really badly toward you. He said I was—what was it, it was a funny expression. Leading you on. He said I was leading you on.”
It felt like being hit again, this time in the stomach. Ivan was looking at me. With a sinking feeling, I realized he expected me to say something.