F
Field Ethos
Guest
By Mr. Blue
I first got put onto this confounding, curmudgeonly old Russian craftsman through a friend. You’d never find him otherwise. Getting to know him turned into a near-surreal experience, but heaven help me, I’ve come to understand him. To quote Jerry Reed, “Let me introduce you to th’ boy.”
The first time I walked into his shop, I knew Dorothy wasn’t in Kansas anymore. The place was a dingy, skinny little storefront in a throwaway stripmall, a place you’d never ask your peripheral vision to waste an instant on, with an ambient scent of an electric coil, leather, and maybe kapusta in the back.
Nobody in evidence, lighting insufficient, the walls covered with things that nobody reading this would even remotely consider owning. Comically gaudy purses, blocky ladies’ shoes last hot in Bulgaria in ’83, fragrances which I only evaluated for ignition properties. All with badly lettered and badly misspelled handwritten price tags.
Yes, I’m a cynic, but my instant conclusion was: This has to be money laundering.
Spoiler alert: I was wrong. Believe it or not, this is actually how Sergei rolls.
There was the sound of some kind of machinery out of sight behind a sort of half-assed three-quarter-tall wall. I noticed it had eye-height peepholes drilled in it, a poor man’s security camera.
I spoke loudly, because I wanted my watch fixed.
The machinery stopped. The light behind one of the peepholes went dark. And, moments later, ol’ Sergei shuffled forth, Oz from behind the curtain, if Oz looked like Gorbachev, but age-advanced by 30 years and 40 pounds. He was not glad to see me. He is, as I have learned, never glad to see anyone. You can go in there today with a suitcase full of Axel Foley’s bearer bonds, and he will not be glad to see you. Don’t be offended. This, it turns out, is simply part of The Sergei Experience.
The next part of knowing Sergei is that he does not want to do any work for you. Right. What retail service provider behaves like that? Well, he does. I handed him my watch. He brushed it away. “This no good. You spend your money on woman, not watch. Your phone tells you time, you don’t need.” He turned back to his workbench. The predominant sign in his window reads “Watch Repair.”
I gently pressed the matter. A long 10 seconds later, he looked up, resignation on his face.
“Give to me.”
I gave.
Long moments followed. Finally: “I will do. But very expensive.”
How expensive?
Seven dollars. Cash. In advance.
Right.
And so we went. He does lots of other fixing services in addition to watch repair, and his prices were great, so I kept going. Same routine every time.
One day, I made the monumental error of addressing him in Russian. My Russian is desperately rusty and was never terribly good to begin with, but I thought he might appreciate the gesture.
His face and demeanor instantly froze.
Across the decades, the overwhelming majority of Russian emigres I’ve known are completely at ease in their new U.S. home, but a few, mostly quite elderly, still had fears of the apparatus of their former Sov state somehow coming after them, and I realized immediately that that’s what was at work here.
I tried to joke out of it—in English—but his Easter Island face stayed in place. And instead of the usual “you don’t need this,” he jumped to “Yes, of course I do.”
Over the next several visits, I tried mightily to re-establish whatever rapport we’d had, but he remained utterly impassive. And an even more fascinating aspect of this psychology was that from visit to visit, he now professed to not remember me. I would greet him by name, but he would act as if we’d not ever had an interaction before. I finally called him on the carpet on it, to which his response was “I am old man. Very bad memory. I do not know.” More of that totalitarian upbringing showing itself: a “bad memory” used to pay critical dividends.
Finally, I hit on the idea of bringing him a bottle. I know zero about vodka, let alone Russian vodka, but I went to a well-stocked and knowledgeable store, and they hooked me up. I presented it to him, looked him the eye, and told him that I am not with the government. That is actually true, if you don’t count contracting.
It was the first softening I’d seen in him since my venture off-track with language. He sat and reflected. Then sighed. Then quarter-smiled, hefted himself off his stool, rummaged in the back room, and came back with a pair of shot glasses. He gestured to me to pour. It dawned on me that, apparently by virtue of bringing the bottle, I’d become the de facto host, and the host pours. I damn near fucked up again by getting ready to give the classic “za vashe zdarovia” toast, which I caught just in time. Instead: “To friendship.”
That somehow did it. It was back to business as usual. He went back to remembering me. He went back to attempting to dissuade me from every effort at using his service. And he kept charging me very, very expensive prices. Seven dollars.
The post Seven-Dollar Sergei appeared first on Field Ethos.
Continue reading...
I first got put onto this confounding, curmudgeonly old Russian craftsman through a friend. You’d never find him otherwise. Getting to know him turned into a near-surreal experience, but heaven help me, I’ve come to understand him. To quote Jerry Reed, “Let me introduce you to th’ boy.”
The first time I walked into his shop, I knew Dorothy wasn’t in Kansas anymore. The place was a dingy, skinny little storefront in a throwaway stripmall, a place you’d never ask your peripheral vision to waste an instant on, with an ambient scent of an electric coil, leather, and maybe kapusta in the back.
Nobody in evidence, lighting insufficient, the walls covered with things that nobody reading this would even remotely consider owning. Comically gaudy purses, blocky ladies’ shoes last hot in Bulgaria in ’83, fragrances which I only evaluated for ignition properties. All with badly lettered and badly misspelled handwritten price tags.
Yes, I’m a cynic, but my instant conclusion was: This has to be money laundering.
Spoiler alert: I was wrong. Believe it or not, this is actually how Sergei rolls.
The Sergei Experience
There was the sound of some kind of machinery out of sight behind a sort of half-assed three-quarter-tall wall. I noticed it had eye-height peepholes drilled in it, a poor man’s security camera.
I spoke loudly, because I wanted my watch fixed.
The machinery stopped. The light behind one of the peepholes went dark. And, moments later, ol’ Sergei shuffled forth, Oz from behind the curtain, if Oz looked like Gorbachev, but age-advanced by 30 years and 40 pounds. He was not glad to see me. He is, as I have learned, never glad to see anyone. You can go in there today with a suitcase full of Axel Foley’s bearer bonds, and he will not be glad to see you. Don’t be offended. This, it turns out, is simply part of The Sergei Experience.
The next part of knowing Sergei is that he does not want to do any work for you. Right. What retail service provider behaves like that? Well, he does. I handed him my watch. He brushed it away. “This no good. You spend your money on woman, not watch. Your phone tells you time, you don’t need.” He turned back to his workbench. The predominant sign in his window reads “Watch Repair.”
I gently pressed the matter. A long 10 seconds later, he looked up, resignation on his face.
“Give to me.”
I gave.
Long moments followed. Finally: “I will do. But very expensive.”
How expensive?
Seven dollars. Cash. In advance.
Right.
Lost in Translation
And so we went. He does lots of other fixing services in addition to watch repair, and his prices were great, so I kept going. Same routine every time.
One day, I made the monumental error of addressing him in Russian. My Russian is desperately rusty and was never terribly good to begin with, but I thought he might appreciate the gesture.
His face and demeanor instantly froze.
Across the decades, the overwhelming majority of Russian emigres I’ve known are completely at ease in their new U.S. home, but a few, mostly quite elderly, still had fears of the apparatus of their former Sov state somehow coming after them, and I realized immediately that that’s what was at work here.
I tried to joke out of it—in English—but his Easter Island face stayed in place. And instead of the usual “you don’t need this,” he jumped to “Yes, of course I do.”
Over the next several visits, I tried mightily to re-establish whatever rapport we’d had, but he remained utterly impassive. And an even more fascinating aspect of this psychology was that from visit to visit, he now professed to not remember me. I would greet him by name, but he would act as if we’d not ever had an interaction before. I finally called him on the carpet on it, to which his response was “I am old man. Very bad memory. I do not know.” More of that totalitarian upbringing showing itself: a “bad memory” used to pay critical dividends.
Finally, I hit on the idea of bringing him a bottle. I know zero about vodka, let alone Russian vodka, but I went to a well-stocked and knowledgeable store, and they hooked me up. I presented it to him, looked him the eye, and told him that I am not with the government. That is actually true, if you don’t count contracting.
It was the first softening I’d seen in him since my venture off-track with language. He sat and reflected. Then sighed. Then quarter-smiled, hefted himself off his stool, rummaged in the back room, and came back with a pair of shot glasses. He gestured to me to pour. It dawned on me that, apparently by virtue of bringing the bottle, I’d become the de facto host, and the host pours. I damn near fucked up again by getting ready to give the classic “za vashe zdarovia” toast, which I caught just in time. Instead: “To friendship.”
That somehow did it. It was back to business as usual. He went back to remembering me. He went back to attempting to dissuade me from every effort at using his service. And he kept charging me very, very expensive prices. Seven dollars.
The post Seven-Dollar Sergei appeared first on Field Ethos.
Continue reading...
