I used to live in St. Petersburg. In order to 'make ends meet', I ended up doing a lot of 'khaltura' - weird odd-jobs, usually translation based, for just about anybody. I recently discovered a diary entry for one meeting, and thought it would be interesting to post it. I sound a bit Edwardian, which makes me wonder what I was reading at the time. Anyway, here it is...

Elena Beresentsova met me in the meeting room of the Russo-American Chamber of Commerce. A primly dressed small woman, on the cusp of being elderly, with a beaming smile and light brownish hair, there was something amateurish about her which put one immediately at one’s ease. It quickly became apparent that this lady liked to do all the talking. I detected a certain pride in her position and her responsibilities as she saw them that caused her to adopt a slightly false, overly officious manner. I was from England? She loved England so much. She went there every year. She regarded it as a second home. She laughed delightedly. Well, not quite delightedly, but rather, she laughed as if she thought that was a place where a person who laughed delightedly might be expected to laugh. She told me the kind of work she would expect me to be doing. They had a man, Andrei ( I had met him at the door; young, black-suited, side parting, strangely patronising, possibly an android) who wrote letters etc. in English, but it was really…such rubbish! Elena laughed at how preposterous his written English was. Her own English was not bad – heavily accented, but mostly correct- but again one detected this anxiety, really a form of snobbery, that caused her to constantly correct herself and find overly colloquial ways of expressing herself. 


She handed me a letter – an invitation to the head of 'Independent Media' – and asked me to look – just look - at the first paragraph. I was prepared for something pretty atrocious, but nothing could have prepared me for the shock which I got then. There was nothing wrong with it. Nothing. Uncertain what to say, I tentatively nodded and said that it could perhaps, on reflection, stand some improvement (first rule of freelancing). After all, everything can, I reasoned. My horror deepened as she then asked me what I would write, if I were to write the same letter. I had no idea. Did I have a pen? Yes, I have one here. “Don’t look at it!” she laughed, referring to poor Andrei’s attempt. “Just tell me what you would write.” 


I was beginning to think this would come to a nasty conclusion and began to stutter something about changing the word order, when she came to my rescue. “I would put it this way,” she said, “though of course I don’t know anything.” It was clear that she thought she did know something, and regarded this as a good opportunity to show me how much. She gleefully butchered Andrei’s English, whilst I hesitatingly offered solemn assent to her changes. “My daughter (she was educated in England, you know, in Oxford), had to do English lessons there. She asked the tutor how to use ‘and’ and ‘the’. He replied, “that’s easy, you just need to live in England for two generations!” A long, drawn out laugh now, which I jogged to keep up with. We finished with the letter, eventually, and she seemed very pleased with my suggestions, though I couldn’t remember having made any. “Andrei is good, but he has been here six months and I just feel his English isn’t good enough…” Was I really hearing this? Was she telling me, who had just walked in the door, that Andrei was heading for the chop? I felt obliged to stick up for him. “Well you know, the letter was perfectly understandable for an English person…” I began. She shook her head resolutely, “…but not good enough. That is our problem, I know,” she finished, misconstruing the intention of my statement. She rhapsodized about England again. She wondered aloud how I could get into her office, since, as part of the American consulate ( a fact of which she tried to appear nonchalant, but was obviously and inexplicably proud) she thought it might present difficulties. She seemed to inflate my worth, strangely, along with the worth of everything else that touched her existence. I felt myself, in her imagination, to be a linguistical expert, or a cultural attaché. I felt that this was a woman whose self-deceptions were too intrinsically linked with her personality to make dismantling them a non-injurious process. We parted on good terms, and I bid Andrei goodbye with more sympathy than I would have imagined on the way in, but with cameras in every part of the building I made sure I didn’t make a face until I was out on the street.