How is the first acquaintance with America

Like a lost child, an emigrant is standing with his head up - maybe tears will flow back into his eyes? A world is moving around it, where every molecule has a goal: an office, an apartment, a dog for a walk, a bad tooth. Each goal has its own emotion, like a stamp on an envelope: pain, hunger, lust, fear. And the emigrant thinks: anything, only not this emptiness, when you do not know what to feel, and nobody needs it. Not people, not dogs, not even the police. He is here for the third day and has not had time to do anything yet. His legs dangle in the air, his hands are looking for something to grab.

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Here the entrances are behind screen doors, as if behind a veil. Tiny mailboxes with blind doors, like in a columbarium, and narrow stairs with polished soles. Doors with brass hinges, latches, water taps with five layers of paint - everything comes from the Jazz Age, but if it breaks, it doesn’t matter - they still make this retro and you just have to go to the store to buy an exact copy. Opening the door in search of the valve, you see dry cockroaches with their paws upside down. Someone says indifferently: “they were poisoned recently” - but that’s not the point. They are huge, the size of a lollipop, and the realization hits you like an avalanche: New York is all around you, you are in a different hemisphere. These are other people's cockroaches.

Brighton Beach is exactly the movie that made Gaidai. Mikhail Kokshenov, with the face of an idiot, no one here will notice. Snack bar with oilcloth tables hung with televisions, nylon pants with stripes, leather caps.

Stooped people of unknown age speak into the phones, holding them near the mouth. The word "sausage" hung in the air, flies down the street: "Misha!".

In the store twilight and plastic counters that strive to hurt your hip. Large men look at shop guts in a businesslike way, and you are again at home, and this is very bad. Herring under a fur coat, dandelion salad, signs in Russian, straight from the designer's nightmare. The gates produce Mercedes and BMW, and you find it funny: 8 machines and none cheaper than 50 thousands.

You are shoved by the metro scheme, weighty as a cigarette case. A million parts, colored lines and dots, as if someone had burned paper, dropping liquid tin through a sieve. B-Train, Q-Train, how do they differ? They are going in the same direction, why is the 2 train instead of one? And you sit down at random in the "Q", in the direction of Manhattan, and you are amazed when the train misses by and turns off somewhere.

You can find this station only after 5 minutes using your fingers on the paper, like a blind reader reading Braille. And how much do not look for this logic, it is not. Draft blows out of you a panorama of the Manhattan Bridge, which was a magical gift just 10 minutes ago.

The poles are plastered with orange notices about train cancellations, but the locals don’t read them. They are connected to the mycelium of New York via a special Wi-Fi. Where does it come from from a person who has not yet coughed up particles of Bobruisk tires? The peanut seller, grumbling, counts 18 times on the dollar, it is clearly visible - one of them is counterfeit, and you ask, believing and not believing - what is this?

The burnt turban starts, the man takes the bag off with annoyance, sticks back the twenty and something gurgles in half-baked English, stirring the air with yellow fingers. Surprising yourself, you crow “F ** k you!”, Not knowing yet that for him it is an empty sound, but for you it is already a biography fact.

Chinese shops, where people move from elbow to elbow from entrance to exit, past shaggy fruits and dozens of aquariums with marine reptiles, this bestiary moves his mustache and turns his gills, saying goodbye to life. Boxes fly from the truck into the ragged belly of the basement, like fat pigeons. He jumps out of a bluish man, and, shuffling about icy porridge on the pavement, rushes back. The bus does not give change. The black driver is about to burst, his eyes and the token are burning with slow fire, looking from dozens in his hand to your face and repeating, like a barrel organ: "Sir, you are delaying the bus." 10 passengers' breath moves behind their backs, they melt the back of your head like butter.

You walk out doomedly, looking down, and trudge off to look for change, and the guy in the shop hammers in the last nail: “We don’t change. Buy something." Purple apple for 69 cents, tastes like rain. You do not speak English. What you thought was English is not English at all. The worst thing is on the phone: there is no help with either your hands or your face. You say familiar phrases, but they hang like damp laundry, and from the sniffling at the other end it is clear that they are trying to put together something meaningful from what they heard. It happens that you are both good, then the conversation goes on in 2 made-up languages. You say goodbye awkwardly, like a traitor - “I’ll call you back,” thinking: anything to never hear from him again.

Relatives go shopping, buying and returning endlessly. You are calling, they can be heard from the bottom of the ocean. "Later," they say, "we are in the mall." And, with the annoyance of a busy person: "In the mall!". Shopping swallowed their souls; De Niro's oily eyes come to mind in an opium den.

The mall is like a badly lit hangar, driven by escalators, endless. You can hear the mountains of clothing go out of fashion every minute. Rhinestones grow dull, price tags turn pale. Chirping women, stupid men with iPhones spread out on the sofas. Very soon you look at clothes, favorite clothes that have flown over the ocean, like at a children's home wardrobe. They were bought by a man without taste and at gunpoint. Why did you carry them? It would be better if you took a good book, one smell is more expensive.

Six months later, nothing will remain - neither the stretched pants of the Svitanok factory, nor the bright ties from O. Henry's short stories: “Give it to your old man, let them hunt an antelope.”

The hardest thing is going back to kindergarten. You have no documents, plastic cards, desires or roots. A weightless spore carried by the wind - maybe it will take root, or maybe it will be washed away by the rain. They lead you around, poke you with a finger, interpret signs, lecture you and leave you waiting, strictly telling you not to leave. This is a concern, but you have lost the habit of it a long time ago, and it’s as if you were back in the day when you were first taken to the dentist. Blacks with an extra pair of hands are suspicious.

I want to look at them, but awkwardly. They say they do not like it and are bullied, is it true? Their children enter the carriage and hang on the railings, they have no idea how to talk, they shout, their faces shyly give way to impudence instantly, as magnesium burns. Emotions jump inside the black bodies, like living carps in a bag.

They take a plane ticket, and you go to the airport with a huge suitcase. A Brooklyn taxi driver from a Russian office has guessed you without turning his head — by breathing, landing, trembling fingers, and now you both know who is in charge here. He stuffs your head with nonsense, like a tow, lands in the far corner of the parking lot, so as not to pay for entry, and does not want to hear anything about the discount coupon.

After standing in line to check in, you find out that they don’t take cash for luggage and you had to pay online, “where’s your card?” says the agent, in her gaze half pity and bewilderment. Pity takes over, but only for 5 seconds: your $100 bill is only good to raise her pencil eyebrows. Then you run around the halls trying to exchange money, but at six in the morning everything is covered in darkness, like seaweed. In despair, with the damned hundred square meters above your head, you shout, forgetting about everything: “Good people!” And there are good people, and now at the inspection - awkwardly in your washed-out socks - with the smile of a paralytic you run through the frame three times, something is constantly ringing in your pockets, and the belt is forever forgotten in the trough. The pants are going down like a landslide.

In 6 hours you turn on California.

Kolya Sulima

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See also:

Venus in Hoodies: American Women Guide

Brightness and poverty Brighton Beach: how the legendary "Little Odessa" lives

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