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and the best Moscow pronunciation.
If they were going to learn Russian, he said, they should learn it right. The
two real, live Russians couldn't have set
things back further if they were trying to do it on purpose. The man's accent
made him sound like a mooing cow. He stretched out all his O's and swallowed
most of the other vowels. The woman sounded more like a Muscovite, but her
mouth was so full of peppery-sounding slang that Annarita could hardly follow
her. And some of what Annarita couldn't understand made the teacher's ears
turn red.
"Comrades, do you have any suggestions for students learning your language?"
Comrade Montefusco asked. He was careful to keep his own pronunciation and
grammar as fine as usual.
Both Russians understood him well enough. "Stoody hard. Woork hard," the man
said. "And yoo'll gooo fur."
The woman winked at the Russian teacher. "Dmitri's right," she said. "And
having a pal on the left never hurt anything, either."
Annarita did understand that bit of slang, and wished she didn't. In Russian,
doing things on the right was the legal way, the proper way. The left was the
bribe, the black market, the underworld ... all the things the glorious
Revolution was supposed to have wiped out but hadn't.
These were the representatives of the greatest Communist republic in the
world? Annarita knew Russians weren't supermen and -women, but seeing them
with such obvious feet of clay still hurt. And they didn't really want to have
anything to do with the class. Why are they here, then? Annarita wondered. But
she didn't need to be Sherlock
Holmes to find the answer to that. Because their boss told them to show up,
that's why.
They'd come late, and they left early. When the door closed behind them,
everyone in the class seemed to sigh at the same time. If any of the students
had any illusions about Russians left, that pair would have shattered most of
them.
Comrade Montefusco sighed, too. "Comrade Mechnikov" the man "comes from
southern Russia, near the Volga,"
he said. "That accent is common there. We have different dialects here,
too think how much trouble you can have talking with someone from Naples or
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Sicily."
He wasn't wrong. Those southern dialects of Italian were so different, they
were almost separate languages. Even so ...
Someone else said it before Annarita could: "The way he talked made him sound
stupid. I don't know if he is, but he seemed like it."
"I know." The Russian teacher spread his hands, as if to say, What can you do?
"For whatever it's worth, people in
Moscow feel the same way about that accent."
"And what about Comrade Terekhova?" Annarita asked. "Am T wrong, Comrade
Montefusco, or did she sound like a zek who'd just finished her term?"
"I'm afraid she did." Comrade Montefusco looked even more unhappy than he had
before. "There's a whole other side to Russian mat\ they call it. It's more
than slang. It's almost a dialect of its own, and it's based on ... well, on
obscenity." He spread his hands again. "The more you deal with Russians, the
more you hear it. And yes, it thrives in camps."
"Can you teach us?" a boy asked eagerly. He wasn't a very good student, but he
sure seemed to want to learn how to be gross in Russian.
But the teacher shook his head. "Foreigners shouldn't use mat\ or not very
much. You almost have to be born to it to do it right."
"What else shouldn't foreigners do?" a girl asked. It was a legitimate
question and it was a lot more interesting than which prepositions meant what
with nouns in which cases.
"Don't try to drink with Russians," Comrade Montefusco said. "I know most of
you drink wine at home. I know you've been doing it since you were bambini.
That's fine. Don't try to drink with Russians anyway, not unless you keep a
spare liver in your pocket. They have more practice than you do. They have
more practice than anybody."
"Why do they need to drink so much?" someone else asked. "They rule the
roost."
The Russian teacher looked at the boy as if he didn't have all his oars in the
water. "One of the things you'll find out when you get a little older is that
everybody has something to worry about. That's how life works."
Annarita had some notion ol what he wasn't saying. The Russian security
apparatus was even bigger and snoopier than the Italian one. Somebody could be
watching you every minute of every day. You never knew which minute it would
be, either, so you had to watch yourself all the time. If you were on edge so
much, wouldn't you want to dive into the vodka bottle to escape for a while?
"What other things do we need to watch out for, Comrade?" Annarita asked.
"Don't tell a Russian he's uncultured, even if he is especially if he is,"
Comrade Montefusco replied. "It's a much worse insult with them than it is
with us. We Italians, we know we're cultured." He preened a little. "But
Russians have doubts. They always measure themselves against Western
Europeans, and they worry they come up short. Some ways, they're like peasants
in the big city. Don't remind them of it."
"What else?" somebody else inquired.
Now the Russian teacher frowned. He'd run out of obvious answers and he'd seen
something else that was pretty obvious. "1 think you people are trying to
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