Third World and I by Misha Firer

1.

     Sometimes I ask myself if I really loved Nadia.

     As if by answering that particular question, miraculously everything else would fall into place, following some sort of reverse domino principle. As if the confirmation of my love for Nadia was a litmus test, whose function was to obtain the truth about me -- whether I was a good or a bad guy, whether I was worthy of my own high aspirations.

     My name is Rodion Sloutski and I have lived as an illegal immigrant in New York for the past year.

     Why did I come here, you might ask me? That’s what all Americans want to know when they first meet me. “Why did you come to this country?”

     Well, probably because of my mother. She always wanted me to live in America. She thought of it as some sort of utopian society, where people had deep communal sympathy and always helped one another. They all lived happily ever after in beautiful houses with no worries in the world.

     But I had my own reasons to come to this country four years ago.

     I was not-so-sweet seventeen, and they were about to draft me to fight rebels in Chechnya. But luckily my elite high school sent me to a two-day seminar in New York to get a taste of capitalistic ways. My country, after being devastated by seventy plus years of communism was restructuring itself according to the Western standards. The seminar was sponsored by guys like George Soros who were busy plundering the natural and human resources of recently emancipated Eastern Europe, a trophy for the Cold War winners.

     Thanks to my mother’s intervention, I was attending that fancy school in an important industrial city -- the Russian equivalent of Detroit -- so I was destined to become an administrator in an automobile or airplane factory catering to Western investors, splitting the profits with transnational corporations, leaving blue-collar workers to scramble for crumbs. That’s why they were sending me to New York, to get a taste of the benefits that were awaiting me once I decided to join the club of the wealthy.

     If I told you I wasn’t interested in the acquisition of wealth, you wouldn’t believe me. But I wasn’t. Not because I was nationalistic, or because I had a soft spot for the underdogs. I just took after my mother. I have an idealistic streak in my character. I am out of my element, exploiting people, taking part in making the rich/poor dichotomy of human relations into a global scheme. I couldn’t fake that I was a committed businessman.

     In New York a bunch of lily-white kids from crucial economic cities in Russia were checked into the New Yorker Hotel. Later that day we were transported by limo to the conference hall at the Rockefeller Center. By the time we got there, the hall was full of thousands of high school kids from the third world countries of four continents. I was appalled: globalization really was proceeding by leaps and bounds.

     From the podium, in the very heart of the Western world, a famous economics professor delivered a sermon about how we could help corporations loot our own countries and make a nice personal profit out of it. He received a standing ovation.

     I made my escape on the evening of the same day. Grabbed my bag, exited the suite, took the elevator, left the building, took the “Q” line and went to Brooklyn.

     You know what they say about New York that it is like a jungle? Well, they are not talking about Brooklyn. Brooklyn is a pool swarming with hungry piranhas and crocodiles. After the Rockefeller Center it was a valuable life lesson about just how privileged I was and what awaited me if I chose to bail out of my pre-selected life path.

     I contemplated my situation and decided to stay in America, at least temporarily. Murdering people for their desire for independence or selling my soul to a business school were simply not options for me.

     First I checked on the prospects of changing my status from a two-day visitor’s visa to something more permanent. For that purpose I went to Brighton Beach, the Russian community of Brooklyn. Arguably it’s the most dangerous part of the piranha-filled pool.

     I followed the newspaper ad to a shady second-floor office. A mobster, reclining in his giant leather armchair didn’t need to hear a word. My dazed face spoke volumes to him, instantly recognizing a tourist. He said, “there’s no way this government's gonna legalize you.” Then he added, “Go and check that I’m not kidding you. I bet you read English, so go and check.”

     I went and checked. He was right. The country was shut and locked against assaults of foreign misfits like me. They passed all the right laws. There was no way I could squeeze in without showing that I had a bag of cash to invest into the American economy.

     When I came back the mobster provided me with choices. They were -- fake driver’s license, fake green card, or fake marriage.

     I was wandering around Brighton Beach where half the businesses around me were illegal and traded in stolen merchandise. In the end, I thought that it didn’t really matter whether I was legal or not, Brighton Beach would provide me with a lot of job opportunities.

     I didn’t plan to stay in America that long anyway. I didn’t know at the time that this was what happened to so many foreigners who came here as tourists. They think, we'll stay here for a year, make some money and go back home. Well, some of them do just that. But still others, a majority, stay for good. That’s the power of the dollar. They start making good money, they forget about their countries, and they begin to enjoy relative freedom -- true freedom, compared to the rest of the world.

     I didn’t recognize the psychology of an expatriate at that time, because not only technically, but psychologically, I was still a tourist.

     I thought I’d stay in this country for two or three years and when I was too old for military service I would return to Moscow. Pondering my future, I telephoned my mother back at home.

     As usual she sounded tired, if not outright exhausted, working two jobs.

     “Oh Rodion. How are you doing? How’s your seminar going? What's America like?”

     I said what ninety nine per cent of potential immigrants on their first day in America say: “It sucks.”

     “You mean the seminar?”

     “The seminar too.”

     If there was any excitement in her voice, she lost it all at once. I felt a twinge of guilt. After all I shouldn’t have crushed her dream like that, with two casually spoken words. Hopefully she wouldn’t believe me, I thought.

     “Never mind,” I said, “it’s nice here.”

     “I'll see you the day after tomorrow?”

     “No, actually I'm going to stay on a little longer.” There was a severe inconsistency here, which too was part of new expatriate syndrome. You love the new country. You hate it.

     There was silence on the other side of the world. Then she asked cautiously.

     “And what about your university?”

     “I’m bailing out. That and Chechnya too. I’ll come back when the coast is clear.”

     “Rodion, you are only seventeen and-“

     “I’m a grown-up,” I said with pathos, “and I can survive by my own wits. And I’ll miss you too.”

2.

     It seems that everything ever said about the feeling of alienation turns into a cliché. And yet when experiencing extreme alienation one doesn’t perceive it in a jaded manner. The spirit is constantly walking on metaphysical broken glass. Lacerated and punctured it bleeds. It feels dizzy, disoriented. Spiritual vertigo, when you fail to find any familiar landscape, any common faces, any understanding.

     For me personally it wasn’t as much longing for my native land as minute-to-minute coping with a new reality that could have been Mars. Many times a day I heard an internal voice: pack your bags and leave. I refused to listen to it. Soon it became a matter of personal challenge, to prove to myself that I could make it on my own, on this alien planet.

     Perhaps it was all about my lack of skill in courtship, my personal fiasco in dealing with members of the opposite sex. So I found a way to compensate for my deficiency, elevate my manly, if not plainly human dignity through this round-the-clock fight for survival with the harsh environment. By fighting this battle to preserve my integrity in the face of dark anarchy, I was attempting to salvage my self-esteem.

     But of course once survival is secured through a matrix of habits, the mind turns on its own accord to the matter of procreation. Once I was settled in New York, with a place to live and job to live on, the inner battle was pretty much won.

     I was making a living by selling pictures of New York landmarks in Times Square, and ironically, next to the Rockefeller Center. A gaudy smudge of faces impressed itself on my retinas and it flashbacked at me even at night. Like some broken piece of machinery, I towered six feet above the sidewalk with my livelihood depending on luring in the tourists' short attention span to a set of badly-painted pictures, courtesy of a girl from a newspaper ad. A Russian girl who was barely older than me was fucking a crap artist in SoHo and was making a living by having suckers like me sell his work in the public places. I just stood there, a spaced-out Martian, numb from biting wind and people’s indifference.

     One day, rolling my cart with the pictures I stumbled on an Internet Café. Actually I passed it every day on my way to the subway station, half a block from the Port Authority Bus Station. I had never noticed it before although they claimed it was the largest Internet Café in the world. It would be mammoth in any normal place but in the center of Manhattan it was a tiny two-story structure dwarfed by the glass sky-scrapers, squeezed between a zillion-room movie theatre and some corporate building that probably was generating more capital than my entire hometown.

     I went in and saw at least a thousand space-monkeys just like me, clicking on their keyboards like madmen, with such intensity that it seemed their lives depended on connecting to other space-monkeys.

     I felt elated. Here was my chance to connect. Connect to women. Here, I could show my inner world first, and my FOB looks later.

     In no time I joined the space platoon working my way into cyberspace, looking for the creatures like me, in whose society I would feel like home.

     It was there, in the cyberheaven of the Easy Everything Internet Café that I met Nadia.

     That day I signed up for three online dating services. Then I wrote a poem, a love poem. Melodramatic stuff about red roses and blue violets, and then spent the night sending it out to thousands of New York women. Of course poems happen to be the last thing New York women want to receive, but I figured there are always exceptions to any rule.

     The next day I checked my email accounts on all of the dating sites I subscribed to and found four responses. Two looked like teasing pranks. Then a heartfelt letter from an unreasonably overweight girl from Freeport, Long Island who was even more desperate for company than I was. The last letter was from Nadia Leon. There was no picture or any information in her profile. There was only one sentence in her letter. I feel like I’m already in love with you.

     Then I wrote her everything, I opened my soul and poured my heart into the letter. The reply came almost instantaneously. We have to meet.

3.

     We decided to meet right away. Nadia lived in Queens and I lived in Brooklyn, so Manhattan was our rendezvous point, our neutral territory.

     There is this theatre in front of the Internet Café on 42nd and Broadway, I typed. I was surrounded by a bizarre clatter of plastic keys -- space-monkeys were on a passive-aggressive early morning spree to get people to pay attention to them. Having achieved that objective myself, I felt elated. I leaned back on my chair and looked around triumphantly. I won. But no one here would cheer me on. Those are the rules of the Internet Café -- the winner goes home without the adulation of his peers.

     Looking around I noticed that the Internet mania had an interracial following. White, yellow, brown and black space-monkeys stared blankly at their flat-screens in relatively equal numbers. Of course most of the space-monkeys were young, or at least youthful-looking, but the infection tended to be indiscriminate in all other respects.

     Through the glass wall I could see red concrete steps rising to the theatre entrance across the street, where we would meet in three hours. What do you look like? I typed on my ICQ icon. “You will see,” was the answer.

     I chuckled sardonically -- yet another overweight, romance-craving white trash teenager. But as the Internet was indiscriminate of gender, age, skin color or bank account status, so I deemed myself disinterested in who really had typed those words on the other side. My desperation required a remedy, and once offered, I wasn’t in any position to complain about its shape.

     I went to celebrate the occasion in the world's largest three-story McDonald’s located next to the Internet Café.

     It was definitely a site to write home to mother about. It was what the Romans called “bread and spectacles.” In its American translation it became “burgers and movies.” The first floor featured long rows of small TV sets, each broadcasting McDonald’s history, from its modest beginnings to the present-day global empire. The second floor was for children. Disney animated movies were projected on the red brick walls. The third floor had a giant screen that showed a football game. You couldn’t get away from the white noise. Even in the restroom they had Muzak.

     The food was disgusting. The clientele consisted of poor people who might didn't have cable at home. They sat and watched, watched the cartoons, watched the sports, watched the commercials. These were modified space-monkeys. And there were more streaming in all the time; more tourists and locals poured through the wide open doors.

     I recognized some familiar faces of the space-monkeys from Easy Everything. They came here to replenish calories to last them through another Internet session.

     I ordered a strawberry milk shake and looked for a spot without a view of a cinematic virtual feast. There were none. It was a very clever design. You couldn’t eat there without having your attention stolen by something or another.

     I sat for a couple of hours watching Finding Nemo along with the rainbow kids. Then I headed for the theatre, where a drama of life was about to take place outside the conventional stage.

     I arrived fifteen minutes early and assumed a vantage point at the top of the stairs. I felt increasingly nervous. That’s where I told Nadia I’d be waiting –at the top of the stairs. She won't miss me, I thought.

     And so I waited. The more I waited, the more agitated I became. I’m not exactly a womanizer as you may have gathered, but I could manage to keep my cool with women. But this time it was different, my prolonged loneliness had worn me down. It was also my first blind date. My first Internet date.

     "Are you Rodion?”

     Am I who?

     A girl was standing on the fourth step from the bottom, three steps from me. She was looking unflinchingly into my eyes.

     “Yes.”

     “I’m Nadia.”

     Nadia was black.

     Not pitch black like those Africans you see on the Discovery Channel, but not as light as most African Americans in the inner cities. But still she was black, no question about that.

     I stood up and shook the hand that she offered me. Already people had begun staring at us. I was confused. Not that it was a totally unexpected thing. And not that I was a racist, or anything—

     “You look just like I imagined you,” Nadia, who was no more than seventeen herself said. Her voice was melodious, with a deep vulnerability. Her brown eyes looked at me in anticipation of beautiful things to come. Her curly hair was braided. Clad in designer clothes, her body looked flawless.

     She spoke with a heavy accent, neither African nor Caribbean.

     “You are beautiful,” I blurted out. I had discovered the sweet secret of the Internet, at times it provided the space-monkeys with beautiful things they would have never gotten in real life.

     After we met on the stairs of the New York theatre everything was a blur to me, my sensations were stoned like the flickering neon of Times Square. We might have gone to watch a movie. Lord of the Rings or some other improbable, stupefying Hollywood epic. Maybe we went to another corporate chain. And I’m sure we talked. I don’t remember what we talked about. At some point I might have offered to go to my place. She said something about her parents, how she tricked them, how she knew we were going to wind up in my place, because our meeting was preordained.

     Manhattan nauseated me with its boiling rationality and economic logic, even its surreal qualities were a mere ruse to lure more space-monkeys into its sphere of influence.

     I mulled over the origins of the space-monkeys. In the beginning, perhaps just like me, they all were normal, ordinary people, human beings. And then something happened. They got disconnected from the outside world and from themselves and fell into a black hole, a no-man’s land.

     So now I had my chance to reclaim my humanity. With Nadia.

     We went to my place in Brighton Beach, a tiny studio, strategically located between the subway station and the ocean.

     I went to the toilet, leaving Nadia alone. I bolted the door behind and stood in front of the mirror clenching the edges of the sink. I wished to see a stranger’s reflection, but it was the all-familiar face, emaciated, bespectacled with light fuzz on the chin and a few nasty pimples strewn over the cheeks.

     I was shivering, as if I had stepped into a cooler. I clenched the edges of the sink tighter. I looked back at my reflection and tried to make it smile. My lips curved in an empty grin, devoid of ingenuity. I looked away.

     I unbolted the door and returned to the bedroom.

     Nadia covered herself toe to chin with my blanket. The light was off and the curtains were drawn.

     I approached the bed and thrust the bed covers aside. Underneath was a naked black girl. She covered her small breasts with her elongated fingers. She was smiling.

     Softly I lifted her fingers. Nadia didn’t protest.

     I slid in next to her and brought my lips to hers.

     “I don’t know how to kiss,” she whispered with a heavy accent. It’s Arabic, flashed through my mind. Her vowels had the harsh sound of consonants. Her female vocal chords mollified that harshness, bringing a melodious rhythm to her speech. She didn’t speak, she sang.

     She uttered words in Arabic, while making love, her desert voice whispered with the harmonious sounds of eternity. Her arms were around me. Her thick lips enveloped mine and sucked on them. A desert kiss, the one I didn’t teach her, the one that she knew instinctively. She whispered, “ya habibi.”

     Her odor was tangible, it penetrated my nostrils, my skin, my mind. The sweet smell of ointment rubbed into her black skin. I touched her braided hair. I felt desire rising within me again. I pressed my body to hers afraid to lose her, my treasured possession, lest she make an escape from my embrace into the cold street, plunging me back into my all-pervasive alienation.

     We fell asleep, our bodies entwined.

     Socially I didn’t feel challenged by dating a black girl, because I wasn’t part of the society anyhow. Nadia’s dating a white guy was a challenge to her, but she chose it on her own volition. She found in me the means of rebelling against her patriarchal Sudanese community. Nadia told me that she never really felt that she belonged here, even after five years in America, she was neither old-fashioned nor modern. For one thing her skin was lighter than others' in the community–her maternal grandfather was Greek -- and in Africa's post-colonial age she was venerated as “their princess.”

     My Jewish heritage had also ostracized me from my Slavic compatriots, and rendered me with intellectual privileges, which were automatically granted for being a member of Semitic race.

     Throughout her life, Nadia was constrained to interact only within the community of Sudanese refugees. They were Christian, a persecuted minority in their Muslim country.

     The Sudanese were very traditional. The smallest social unit was the family, not the individual. Thus the family was considered sacred to them, just like the individual in the West. Interaction between the sexes was patriarchal to the point of extremity: originally, their idea of punishing a wife’s infidelity was stoning to death.

     When I met Nadia, she was still a virgin, and literally dying to break away from the patriarchal code of behavior. She wanted to sin so much. She wanted to be independent.

     Gradually I realized that we had to live in two worlds. The first, intimate, our personal world behind four walls that belonged solely to us, and the other, social, that with time provided us with a serious challenge.

     New York's notorious public tolerance was overstretched once they confronted us. They tried so hard to understand and accept, I could see it in their fatigued faces, but just couldn’t digest our act of social disobedience: a skinny be-spectacled guy hugging lovingly a gorgeous-looking black girl. The contrast bewildered New Yorkers, and sometimes they expressed their bewilderment in articulated condemnation. Their reaction ranged from dull puzzlement to laughter and at times hostile remarks.

     On Times Square, the black kids wanted to shake my hand, they patted me on the shoulder, they cheered me proposing to initiate me as one of their own. Brighton Beach, on the other hand, was extremely hostile. My compatriots cursed, laughed, spat and pushed me. White Americans feigned indifference and turned their eyes away from lingering on observing the details of what they saw as a freak show.

     More and more we were pressed to stay home, avoiding passive aggression, and sometimes actively aggressive attacks on our idyll.

     “Oh my big butt,” she lamented in the shower stall. “I feel shy, because it is so big.”

     “I love your big butt,” I said sincerely. “Why do you care what anyone thinks about your big butt? Besides it is beautiful as it is.”

     I turned off the faucet and we stepped out of the shower. I rubbed her tight body dry with a towel. We stood naked looking at our reflections in the mirror. There was something grotesque, something improbable, illogical in what we saw. I tried to convince myself that in fact it was my perception that was illogical. Only because it reflected, coincided with the common opinion of the masses, didn’t necessarily mean that our love affair ran counter to nature. This time again I found myself facing the same improbable dilemma. If I’m right in being with Nadia, than the whole world is wrong.

     We stood like that for a while, my cheek rested against Nadia’s shoulder, gawking at the mirror, trying to envision what it was like to be seen by the mainstream public, outside the bliss and comfort of our hide-out. I tried to perceive the mental constructs, to pinpoint and analyze the possible unnaturalness of our union.

     I found none. Yes, we were breaking the norms. But no, there was nothing unnatural about it.

     “I love you, Rodion,” she whispered in my ear, “I love you more than anything in this world. I love you more than myself.”

     “I love you too,” I answered at her reflection in the mirror.

     “I’m going away to college next month,” Nadia announced with feigned casualness in her voice. She was smiling, “I’ll be so glad to get away from my community and be on my own.”

     I felt a twinge of relentless destiny reaching out to me.

     “Don’t you think it’s time to tell your family about me?”

     “Aw-aw,” Nadia wagged her index finger playfully at me, “I’d be in trouble.”

     Her family’s displaced orthodoxy began to irritate me. But actually, I was irritated with Nadia for taking it seriously, maybe only half-seriously, but enough to keep the affair secret from her parents. Somehow it was obvious that only after dealing with Nadia’s parents, could our relationship move to another level.

     “Where’s your college?” I asked Nadia, my voice shaking, because suddenly I realized that the college could be anywhere, for instance in Rochester, New York.

     “In Queens. It’s called Queensboro College.”

     Thank God.

     “I guess we’ll be meeting less often now. I will have classes and homework, and I’ll have to work too.”

     Nadia was merging into mainstream society with giant steps.

     “No guys I hope,” I said dejectedly.

     “Naw-naw-naw!” Nadia flared up, in her habitual playful way, “only you, my Rodion.”

     She planted a Western kiss on my lips. My reaction was cold, so she said, “Kiss me, Rodion. You are such a good kisser.”

     “Can you promise that you won’t be flirting with other guys?”

     “Yes! Don’t you trust me?”

     We merged in a kiss.

     Cultural differences, social differentiations, personal destinies. All swept away by panhuman lust.

     A month later Nadia left me.

4.

     One day wandering in Central Park, I came across the economics professor, the one from the lecture a million years ago at Rockefeller Center. He was sitting on a bench reading a worn-out copy of a volume by Noam Chomsky. As a way of introducing myself I said, “Professor you are the last person in the world I would expect to see reading Chomsky.”

     The professor raised his eyes and asked, “Do I know you young man?”

     I told him about the global leadership symposium I participated in.

     “By your worn-out appearance I can judge that you didn’t buy into my lecture.”

     I stared at the book realizing that my response wasn’t going to be simple. I said, “In retrospect I can see that I was wrong. Or not exactly right. I had set high standards and couldn’t live up to them.”

     I told him about my confrontation with the third world in the person of an African girl, about my exploiting her and her subsequent departure for the club of privilege I had fled.

     The professor shut the book and said, “We all have ideals and try so hard to live up to them.”

     He rose to his feet and offered me his book.

     “Don’t you give up yet,” the professor said, “keep on trying.”