By Ari Neumann

St. Petersburg and I weren’t going to work out.

I liked the cold but I didn’t like the wet. And while having the Hermitage around was cool, the sun setting at 4 in the morning only to rear its ugly face again at 6 was not, cool, and I certainly didn’t want to pay four dollars for a cup of Nescafe just to work or study out of home.

And, Oh God, a twenty minute metro ride to the center of town from the barely inhabitable dormitory I had been offered by the university?

I can’t, Pete. I just can’t.

Also: the Russia I had gotten to know over the past few years was a provincial one, made up of small, formerly industrial towns of half a million or so that somehow continued to put-put-putter on in a state of being half-dismantled for scrap metal. The Russia I was familiar with was not cosmopolitan in any sense of the word, was nostalgic for the past –– both Soviet and Imperial –– and utterly unaware of the world beyond the Border. Mine was a Russia I loved for its extremes, not for its cultivated facade, and when I fancied myself a young cowboy.

And so, St. Petersburg, though ready to greet and take me in with its (wet) open arms, was not the Russia I wanted.

With my junior year of university quickly approaching and with no desire to return to Montreal for school, I started to panic. I had spent a solid semester organizing my study abroad program in St. Petersburg, but now that I was here, and now that I understood that I wanted nothing to do with this swampy, gorgeous mess of a town, I felt lost.

Fortunately, I had an entire summer ahead of me, and no need to make any hasty decisions. I had plans to study Russian for a month in the city of Izhevsk –– famous for its Kalashnikov factory, a little-known, Finno-Urgic speaking ethnic group known as the Udmurts and a man-made pond that supposedly doubled as a resting ground for those repressed in the 20s –– after which I wanted to spend two months in Armenia, studying Armenian.

Surely, I felt, something along the way would point me in another, more suitable direction for my junior year of university abroad?

But why Armenia? Good question.

This was a question my parents and friends had been asking me for months. While my friends showed polite disinterest in my new found fixation, my parents showed dispolite distaste. I had always been a bit of a wanderer, reliably and predictably fickle in my decisions, and constantly studying new languages and countries that were anything butappropriate for a New York Jew.

And so my shipping off to a country that they had only vaguely heard about in the context of other Holocausts didn’t exactly strike them as a sign that I was becoming more focussed in my academic career –– not to mention in life –– and this was certainly not a direction that was going to bring me closer to the Schul.

But for me, Armenia was a logical match, and continues to be.

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It all started with my 11th grade chemistry teacher, Mrs. Alikian, who was to become my first Russian teacher, my second mama-jan and a life-long mentor. She was as round and plush as a marshmellow, a bit on the shorter side. Her eyebrows and hair, frequently dyed, alternated between dark browns and reds, complimenting a kind and understanding pair of coffee-coloured eyes.

Her thick and ironically Russian accent was incoherent: a number of students claimed to have failed her class because they couldn’t understand her. But if you were one of the lucky few who could temper her abysmal assault on the English language, you then had to wade through her frequent and terrifying temper-tantrums, which would rain down on class in a fury of spitting, screaming, laughing and crying, often on subjects entirely unrelated to chemistry:

«Class, my gods, you won’t believe what I tell you now. Last day, oy, last night, my husband, he tell me make him kofe. I tell him I can’t make him kofe I’m busy with work for you guys so I tell him make him kofe himself. So he say okay and leaves room. He come back twenty minute later and ask me, ‘Where’s my kofe?’ And when I tell him I couldn’t make it he start to yell to me! And you know, class, we, my husband and me, we yell so much the neighbor call the police they think we hurting each other, or something! So then I had to explain all this stupid stuff about the kofe…»

The fact that she could express anger, frustration and humor in the same story, and all within the space of a minute, made me certain that she would make for a good Russian teacher.

I approached her after the first day of class:

«You are Russian?» I asked. Her abysmal English and her habit of reversing subject and verb had already rubbed off on me.

«No, I am Armenian.»

«But you can teach me Russian, no?»

(Because Armenians, are like, Russians, no? They just they live in their own country?)

Her eyes lit up. «Of course, my dear, only let’s start next month. Yes? And if we both make it through my class, yes? and still like each other, I be happy to teach you Russian. Yes? Eghav? It happened?»

Yes. Eghav. It happened.

A month later, we still liked each other. After school had been let out for the day, I knocked on the door to Mrs. Alikian’s classroom to have our first lesson.

«Come in!» she screeched from inside.

She swivelled in her chair to face me as I opened the door, her legs barely touching the floor. She motioned for me to sit next to her on a wooden stool. As I waddled up to her desk she told me that from then - on, she was only going to speak Russian. When I asked her how that was going to work, given that I barely knew how to say «privet», she responded with a battery of rapid-Russian, of which I only understood the final word ––«eghav?» –– having heard it so many times in class.

I responded to her in kind, mustered up a faint «eghav», and considered myself a student of the Russian language.

She asked to see my Russian handwriting. I wrote out in print leters the few words I knew. Seeing that I was unable to write in script, she laughed, yanked the pen from my hands, crossed her legs and wrote the alphabet in a beautiful, sprawling cursive. Handing me back my notebook, now graced by her superior handwriting, she commanded: «Learn write like this. Otherwise people think you stupid, no - education like kind of person. Eghav, Ari jan?»

Terrified of being taken for a ‘no - education like kind of person’, I obeyed, and our classes continued smoothly on. Within three months, I was well on my to understanding Russian, at least when speaking with Mrs. Alikian. It wasn’t hard, because we revisited the same topics daily. Our lessons were largely a continuation of her daily rants against the stupidity of her students, or, rarely, when she realized she had been unjust in class, she would offer an explanation of her marginally-psychotic behavior from earlier that day. Once she told me:

«You see, Joseph jan, in Armenia, in Yerevan, I was discipline…disciplinary… disciplinarianess? Student don’t behave? He come to me, Mrs. Alikian. Student not do work? Student pay Mrs. Alikian visit, and we have talk. Student don’t come to class…?»

She trailed off, looked coyly at me and whispered: «It was my job to make face so redthat it stayed like that for week!» And she giggled with delight at her marginal sadism.

Seeing my mouth hanging open in disbelief, she added, «It is real shame we can’t hit kids anymore. Really, shame. I like America, but some things here aren’t done right. Like not hitting kids. Ekh.»

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My favorite example of her ability as a successful ‘disciplinarianness’ was her treatment of one student who coulnd’t be bothered to complete his assignments. One day while collecting homework Mrs. Alikian decided to put an end to his continued resistance. She called him up to the front of the class, and had him sit by her on her desk. Thin and lanky, he looked scrawny next to Mrs. Alikian’s plus-sized physqiue. She huddled up next to him, draped an arm around his neck and gently cooed and questioned in his ear, «Why you not do your homework, Casey jan?»

His answer was simple: he got home too late from school, and didn’t really care that much about chemistry to begin with. While searching for excuses, he squirmed beneath Mrs. Alikian’s embrace, and half-heartedly flapped his arms about him as if to

demonstrate that he was about as useful as a goldfish, and thus shouldn’t and couldn’t be blamed for not completing his assignments.

Mrs. Alikian took pity on him, and wondered aloud how it was possible that her best student, the best she had ever had, couldn’t find the time to do the work for the subject he loved so much? Casey’s face crinkled in confusion, and he told her: she was wrong, he was not her best student. Mrs. Alikian smiled, stroked his head and told him to stop being so shy, to stop lying, and to tell the class and herself that he was, in fact, her best student. Desperate to put an end to this spectacle and to get back to his seat, he grumbled as he was told.

Mrs. Alikian cupped her ear with the same hand that was wrapped around Casey’s shoulders, and squeezed him tightly about the neck: «I didn’t hear you, Casey jan. I have bad hearing. What you said?»

She forced him to repeat himself louder and louder, until she had him practically yelling, «I am your best student, Mrs. Alikian!», his words echoing in the hallways outside. When finally it seemed that Mrs. Alikian was ready to let him go, she relaxed her grip around Casey, stroked her drooping chin and smiled devilishly: «Maybe you take off your shirt, Casey jan? I see here it very tight shirt –– but nice one, really –– and I think it constrict your throat muscles or something and vocal chords…, you know?»

Casey turned red in the face, then white, then broke out in a sweat.

A chuckle rippled across the classroom. Though I was enjoying Mrs. Alikian’s live demonstration of the power of public humiliation, this was legally grey area we were approaching, and could boild down to a sexual harassment complaint in a matter of moments.

Casey begged: «What, Miss? My shirt? I can’t take off my shirt! I can’t. Miss, please!» His arms and goldfish-gills flapped hopelessly about him as he wondered to himself: Could she really do this to him?

Sensing his panic and embarassment, and thus her victory, Mrs. Alikian smiled at him, and gracefully laying a hand on his shoulder, said, «My best student doesn’t have to do anything of the sort. Go be a good boy, my best student, and sit down.»

Mrs. Alikian’s best student that loved chemistry maintained a steady B- average for the next two years. She forced him into AP.

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But beyond being whacky, unpredictable, verging on violently-abusive and having an accent as thick as her students’ noggins, Mrs. Alikian was much more to me than a source of enjoyment in an otherwise banal, suburban New York, high-school setting.

She quickly became a mother - figure to me, and took an active interest in my personal life. When I wasn’t listening to her complain about the difficulties of teaching and the unfair lot she had been given as a high school teacher, I was being instructed in the art of ‘knowing-how-to-live-life-according-to-Mrs.Alikian-who-knows-best.’

Our Russian classes together quickly turned into therapeutic, hour-long discussions of my aims in life, my problems –– I wanted to be a literature professor: was that an aim or a problem? –– and whatever happened to be bothering me that day.

Her emotionally intuitive character and her –– verging on illegally –– different approach to pedagogy got me interested in her personal life and past as well: I wanted to know, who was this woman? Where does she come from? Why does she wear that really long shawl that she’s constantly tripping over in class? And why can’t she pronounce the word ‘waves’ (veyfs) correctly? And is it really good for the heart to drink that much coffee? Did Noah actually land in Armenia? Did Mrs. Alikian actually beat students as a school principal in Yerevan? And most importantly,

what is Armenia?

Our lessons were frequently interrupted by phone calls from relatives, whom she would ask without fail, «ur es?» or «where are you?» When I asked her why she had to know where they were, she gave me a quizzical look, as if I had asked something silly, and replied, «I don’t know, really…I just do!»

When I first heard Mrs. Alikian speaking Armenian, it sounded to me like a series of magic spells and incantations. It had a deep - black, whispery - liquidy flavor to it, which instantly peaked my curiosity. While speaking with her family, she would frequently break into quick spurts of Russian, which generally had to do with administrative and household problems –– «when are you going to take the car to the garage? did you tell the neighbor to keep it down? how many more chairs do we need at the wedding? can’t she just boil water in a pot, I mean, why do we need to buy another kettle?» –– but when she would revert to Armenian, her tone would become more affectionate, and she would even make a soft whimpering sound when talking to her sons or husband. Armenian, I understood, was her language of choice for intimate