“A MONSTER HUGE, MANY-EYED AND BARKING...”
“Hi! It's us. So much time has passed, wow... Willie from ‘The Sportsman’ (remember, the one who always wore shorts and boots), now wears jeans and boots, so we know for sure: autumn has begun. But otherwise – everything as usual...”
They write from their capitalist faraway such letters that it's impossible to answer. What can I tell them? That I invite a guest for dinner, and he says: “Thanks, I ate today”? Or that I await the presidential election like the Second Coming? They wouldn't understand what I'm talking about... Over there, everything is as usual.
“An autumn evening in a quiet town, proud of its presence on the map...” Is that Brodsky about which city – about Soviet Artemovsk in Donetsk region or about Ames, Iowa? It seems their main achievement is a uniform, monotonous existence in which you get stuck like a fly in syrup. It's amazing how a thick, strictly regulated constancy of well-being is formed with a hundred grimaces. How America manages to be different while being the same. An American visa is a pass to a prosperous unknown somewhere. Possibly to dreary Indiana. Possibly to cheerful California. Possibly to respectable Washington, D.C. It's impossible to describe America. Although, if you choose the right angle... Let's risk it. So: “Willie from ‘The Sportsman’, who always wore shorts and boots...”
GIGANTOMANIA VERSUS GIGANTOMACHY
The charm of well-being and peace turns a newcomer into a domestic pet. The charm of the Empire, a vast space crisscrossed by highways, gives this pet a sense of significance. Everything here is huge, from the signature sandwiches of the “I'll tear your mouth!” model from the “American Airlines” department to the (continuing?) high sky – it really seems higher here, perhaps because the air is clearer, and also because the sun's rays hit the earth at a different angle, changing the lighting, casting shadows differently.
Gigantomania is something you have to experience: walk through the meaningless labyrinths of the largest mall in the States, Mall of America, and realize that everything necessary for life is in the nearest supermarket. Ride in a huge locally made “Lincoln” to appreciate a small nimble “Nissan”. Sleep on an eight-square-meter hotel “king-size” bed to miss a cozy, womb-sized home sofa. Another six months – and you realize you almost never enter four of the six rooms of the house you bought. And then rent a backhoe loader and dig a huge pit for a pool. That you buy the same brand of cheese, tea, apples. The same wine. Go to the same café for lunch, even though there are a dozen on the next street. It's calmer that way. But what possibilities, what possibilities! In general, it's a bit like wandering the Internet: if you know what you want, you'll find it for sure and in considerable quantities, and if you don't, you'll get stuck in the information web, waking up on the third day or when your eyes hurt. Have you seen how Americans walk through their museums? “Van Gogh, beautiful! Duchamp, well done! Georgia O'Keeffe, draws well, a woman!” And seriously? Seriously, they come only to see what they like, fifth floor, right wing, hall down the corridor to the right. Or, hopelessly tangled in the web of their own skeleton, they suffer between the beauty of all times and peoples from the pangs of intellectual indigestion.
This is one of the properties of a huge country – it allows a citizen to remain an “eternal youth”, a dilettante, a well-earning infant, until gray hair. It endlessly keeps in the giant safe of its spaces an interest-free loan of “happy chance”, the very one that creates the USA's reputation as a “land of unlimited opportunities”.
“ON THE ROAD”
This is the title of Kerouac's cult novel dedicated to America of the 60s-70s, America of the beatnik era, hippie movement, and other liberal-bourgeois freethinking. The era has sunk into oblivion with nonconformist ideals on board; today, a Midwesterner, upon hearing a question about the presence of a hippie colony in his state, will spend about ten minutes trying to understand what kind of animals his interlocutor is interested in. Nevertheless, the expression “on the road” still adequately describes the state of Americans as a nation unusually mobile and easy to pick up. Americans without much regret sell off their belongings and quickly move if they find a higher-paying job or simply get bored. We inherited from “the Union” the belief that there is nothing better than faithful service at one enterprise and no word more bitter than “job-hopper”. For Americans, it's normal to “seek better from good”: while working in one office, they periodically send resumes to other addresses, and if they manage to find a more promising high-paying job, the previous employer lets them go without malice and with good recommendations. In addition, relative financial well-being allows Americans to take any kind of domestic disorder more lightly and even find a certain charm in it.
A familiar married couple, with two children and quite respectable, after both spouses turned sixty, gave up the idea of having their own house for a decade. Lynn and Gene got themselves a motorhome. In this very “motorhome” they traveled across the country, saving considerably on winter clothes and sunscreen: in the summer heat they went closer to the cool Great Lakes, in winter they moved to Florida or Mexico. This lifestyle did not seem extravagant even to Gene's elderly, very “bourgeois” wealthy parents.
FATHERS AND CHILDREN
Relations between parents and children are what seems strange in this country to a person raised in an environment steeped in patriarchy. These are relations of non-violence and non-interference, sometimes seeming cold and aloof.
A grandmother, traveling across half the country to visit her granddaughters, stays in a hotel near the granddaughters and takes the girls to her place to eat tasty donuts in the hotel restaurant and swim in the hotel pool. God forbid, the grandmother is not at all in a quarrel with the children's mother, her daughter – it's just more convenient for her. Children aged four to six are asked to pack their own things in a backpack when they go somewhere for a short time. After school, children go to university far from home – to live separately from their parents and struggle with difficulties. The elderly end their lives in nursing homes – giving them to the care of social workers is considered a non-evil, normal act by loving children. “Get your life!” – an expression like “live for yourself” – is one of the common American “best wishes”.
CEMETERIES
Without mysticism and sentiment, burial is an act in the service sector; the same market laws apply to the funeral rite as to buying a vacuum cleaner: more expensive models, cheaper ones, discounts, surcharges, special services... And with sentiment, the way of burying is, of course, a continuation of the way of living.
How do Americans bury their dead? I didn't get to visit a privileged cemetery for those especially distinguished in the field of capitalist accumulation. Ordinary cemeteries, created for the repose of ordinary people, express the attitude towards death of those who patiently, generation after generation, bury themselves in American soil. They look the same: a lawn covered with a thick coat of green grass with mounds of graves swelling here and there, like mosquito bites on delicate skin. On the graves are marks of small plaques, resembling memorial plaques embedded directly into the ground: “Here rests such-and-such esquire”. Not a tree, not a bush. Between the mounds, a lawnmower buzzes, on which sits a melancholic man. The man is busy. Mowing the grass.
INERTIA OF CONSUMPTION
Only in America do you realize how many things you need to, as one of Salinger's heroines put it, “function normally”. For example, you realize how necessary Kleenex tissues with aloe extract and paper towels in the kitchen are. You wonder how you could do without napkin rings and a special banana stand, or sweep the porch with a little broom – instead of using a garbage-blowing device that roars like a space rocket. How you lit gas burners with matches, not with a built-in stove lighter. How you could dry laundry in the laundry room and not throw a blotter soaked in something moderately stinky “for scent” into the dryer. In short, it suddenly dawns on you that you simply miraculously did not die, and you offer prayers of gratitude to civilization with every visit to the supermarket.
Some crazy people, however, turn out to be unable to adapt to local consumer standards. These people insist that things exist to be renounced. The parties of “consumer society” are not necessarily former “Soviet people”. Anglo-Saxon “natives” are often more radical in their rejection of things. A certain contingent of citizens lives their whole lives in hotels – not because these people couldn't get a loan for a house or at least rent a cheap studio – they just like it that way.
One of my acquaintances, a Californian, would have an inventory of property (forget about clothes) that would take two lines: the first – a powerful motorcycle, the second would list chic “sunglasses” worth $120. At the time of our acquaintance, she was thirty-five; and no one thought to consider her crazy because she didn't have a washing machine or a husband.
People “with convictions” volunteer for the Peace Corps and go somewhere to the cradle of humanity, into the wilds of Africa, away from Democrats, Kleenex, computers, and Republicans – to teach the local population English and talk about the delights of civilization. The “new Africans” seriously get a kick out of the need to carry drinking water in a vessel placed on their head and the importance of their missionary mission.
Simpler people just spit on the rules of consumption: I remember, for example, a saleswoman from a music store, a pretty girl in a blouse with worn-out elbows. The girl cheerfully chatted with customers, nimbly sorting through the “CDs” she offered them. I recall that holes of about the same size in my school uniform once drove my mother to despair, and I suffered in tune with her.
DON'T FEED THE CROCODILES!
This chapter is about the simple joys of American existence. About nature. It leaves no chance for nostalgia for a Ukrainian: not only is bacon sold in stores under the name “bacon”, but America also abounds in privatized by domestic “kvass patriots” viburnum, mallows, marigolds, and other symbols of botanical independence. Let's keep quiet about birches (with grayish trunks, though), totems of our historical competitors...
What strikes you in America – doesn't let you forget that you are in a distant country, on a different continent – is the abundance of birds. Unfamiliar, bright colors, elegant, large and small. On the ocean coasts closer to Mexico, pelicans hang out, resembling either pterodactyls or heavy bombers. In the Midwest, squirrels are habitually endearing – red tree squirrels and gray ground squirrels. And rabbits, which you don't step on in the evening on university campuses only because you watch your step. From what I've heard: a friend in Idaho has something like a mole or something else living behind the house: large, furry, timid. A friend in California has a family of skunks living in the bushes near the house, smelling specifically, and far from the house, on the coast, sea lions bark restrainedly all day long. But that's not exotic, just so...
And crocodiles are not exotic. At least in Florida. In the park of one of Florida's universities by the river, there is a strict sign: “Do not feed the crocodiles!” This is serious, by the way, and in the evenings it's better not to go near the water.
California state law has a strict clause about elephants: it is forbidden to appear on the street with an elephant that is not wearing a halter. This is also serious. How difficult do you think it is to convince citizens of a country so rich in wildlife that brown bears roam the streets of Moscow?
YOU CAN'T FORBID LIVING DREARILY
How do our former compatriots live in America? Not well. Not all, of course, but many (not to say most). This is also surprising. Compatriots quickly adopt the life stereotypes of the “middle class”. They work a lot in modest positions. They eat a lot, move little, gain weight. They watch TV – a good TV with a big screen. They learn to call shashlik “barbecue”. They go out into nature: they don't walk where they shouldn't, they don't light a fire because it's forbidden, they drink beer, eat food, return home. Once a year they go on vacation to Europe: hotel, restaurant, English-speaking guide, shopping. They say: “I chose freedom.” They also say “You can't run away from yourself.”
“CULTURE SHOCK”
Another “American surprise”: how quickly you stop being surprised... How quickly you get used to the fact that it's not scary, you're not offended, no one is rude, that there is everything necessary and a lot of unnecessary. How quickly you get into character, start criticizing the government (senate, boss, president) and the bureaucratic machine, get used to paying taxes, buying only skim milk, and trusting police and doctors (though in vain, in vain!). You read in brochures for immigrants and interns about “culture shock” – according to the compilers, it should be experienced by all newcomers to the States without exception – and you don't understand what they're talking about.
Don't worry, culture shock is ahead, beyond the gangway of the plane that landed in Boryspil. There, they ask for money for a luggage cart that is free everywhere. There, they lose your luggage. There, you get home light and look around: wow, everything is so small, and arranged seemingly carelessly. It seems as if objects have pulled their legs under the bench and shrunk to take up less space and not be yelled at. As if they are all emigrants, as if their homeland was taken away...