“How do you feel?” she asked.
“Ready,” I replied.
·
That evening, I was back in the dining room for dinner, sitting silently at a table with three other Learners. I was to settle in for now and start my program early the next morning.
The crowd was similar to the last time. Most were glowing and immaculately dressed, others looked like eccentric professors with their spectacles and tweed. Even the ones who stood out—a skinny white man, for instance, with hot pink streaks in his hair, ear studs, tattoos, distressed jeans, and a black hoodie that had “anarchist” spray-painted on the back—looked so pristine that it was obvious their non-conformity had been meticulously curated. Two or three faces, including the “anarchist’s,” seemed familiar, maybe from TV. One man, gray-haired and chisel-jawed and in impossibly good shape, looked, I thought, like the host of a popular cooking show about traveling the world and introducing viewers to exotic cuisines. But I couldn’t be sure; maybe he just had a TV-friendly face and I’d invented the rest. Another, a woman made up mainly of limbs—who, just with her aura, made me feel as if she were conferring a favor simply by allowing me to exist within the same space—looked like someone I’d seen on a yacht in a Daily Mail article, beneath a headline about cellulite or “perfect beach body” or something like that. I enjoyed watching my fellow Learners in this way, formulating stories about them in my head that I hoped would keep boredom at bay this time around. But I would never know if my stories were accurate; we all came and left separately and, obviously, never spoke while there. We’d even had it written into our NDAs that if we were to bump into one another outside the Centre, we were to maintain the same vow of silence. I didn’t mind though. It meant I could be as outlandish as I wanted with the stories I concocted for them.
The next day, after breakfast and meditation, I was back in my language booth. I found that my experience with Anna was completely different from the one I’d had with Peter. Even before I could understand her, I’d listen with a smile on my face, lulled by the depth of her tone, by her easy pauses and sweet chuckles. When I listened to Peter, I often found myself clenching my jaw, and the images that came to mind as he spoke were jagged and spiky, metallic and sharp. Anna, in contrast, was all softness and flow. The sound of her voice made my forehead loosen and expand, my breath deepen, and my body relax. My dreams were also very different from the last time. After a day spent with Anna, I dreamed of warm buttered bread, of the seaside, and of a young child, softly nestling against my breast.
It also helped that I knew what to expect now and wasn’t worried about “doing it right.” I was able to passively absorb Anna’s words, sometimes making up stories for what she was saying, sometimes thinking of other things altogether, and often in a kind of meditative state between sleep and wakefulness, without any concrete thoughts passing through my head. I think this was what the couple who’d interviewed me had meant by “presence.” And now that it came more easily to me, the process worked faster. By day four, the switch had flipped. I was able to understand Anna completely.
Anna spoke, through the headphones, of her childhood in Kazan. She had started working, in her late teens, for a dress shop where she would embroider intricate flowers onto clothes, hats, and handbags. Her mother had been in the same trade. Anna described sitting in her mother’s lap, at the age of nine or ten, in front of the fireplace, guiding a delicate needle in and out of a soft piece of fabric held in place by a wooden hoop while her mother, who I imagined shared her soft chuckle, told her how wonderfully she was doing. Later, Anna would teach her own daughters how to embroider, her daughters who, she said with pride, had each excelled in their lives more than she could have imagined.
At first, it sounded like Anna had half a dozen daughters, so varied were the names she used for them. Like Natalya was also frequently Natasha, as well as Natashinka when she was being praised and Natashka when criticized. Eventually, I figured out that Anna had three daughters. One had three children of her own and Anna was saving money to help her move to England. Another was a shop owner in St. Petersburg, and the third, a nurse, had moved to the States.
Anna’s stories filled me with a warmth that I carried with me even outside the language booth. It seemed to come from my belly, and, if I breathed in long and slow, would permeate my whole being. It kindled a hazy memory that I couldn’t quite trace, and I started to feel that it was a warmth that I had last experienced when I had been inside the womb.
There can be something quite devastating in feeling a comfort you can barely remember. It can make you grieve, if I’m honest, for something that you’d always felt a vague sense of loss over but never known for certain you were missing. At the same time, there is a sense of relief at having finally found it, the warmth.
I tried to explain the feeling to Shiba. She was glad to hear that I was imbibing the language more easily than the last time and especially delighted about the feelings that Anna had evoked.
“I told you she’d be good for you,” she said.
“It’s bizarre. I don’t have the words for it. I just feel … held.”
“She always had a maternal spirit, didn’t she?”
“She really does,” I said. I ran my fingers across Anna’s name, embossed into the purple band around my wrist, and remembered my head on her lap as I sobbed with homesickness.
“You know you’ve had it within you all along, don’t you? This warmth that you’re feeling. Anna’s just helping bring it out.”
“Do you think it’ll stay?” I asked. “Even when I leave? How can I make sure I keep it?”
“It’s something you’ll need to feed and nourish, but there’s no reason it shouldn’t stay.” She paused for a moment before continuing. “You know, sometimes, I think this is the real reason we’re here, for these other gifts that we receive in the process. You start to find the language learning becomes almost incidental.”
·
Things passed like this, easily and gently, for my first few days at the Centre. But then, despite the pleasure of spending time with Shiba and my gratitude for all that Anna was giving me, I felt the stirrings of a familiar cabin fever. I missed my home: my kitchen, my bed, my cat, and my friends, and yes, my phone. Maybe most of all my phone. I thought it would be easier this time around, having done it already and realized that I wouldn’t die without social media for ten days, but the truth is, once again, I was itching to check my WhatsApp and read my emails.
I felt that the garden, too, had turned against me, the wind blowing me in the direction of the exit when I walked by, the bark of the trees scraping against my skin when I leaned against them, the spiky leaves extending to poke me as I passed, even a chirping swallow pooping on my elbow once as I waited for Shiba beneath the willow tree. It felt like time to go home. I was perfectly fluent now, after all, and eager to return to the world, to find my next book to translate. And the new sense of groundedness that Anna provided only reaffirmed my desire to heed my gut instincts. So, on day six, I decided to ask Shiba whether I could leave early.