Svetlana Morozova

Her Story

The dictionary on my lap is older than you are, and it smells like the glue they stopped making in 1974 — sharp, sweetish, a little dusty. I read with one finger under the line and a red pencil behind my ear, because proofing isn't reading, it's hunting. That's the state you find me in: proof pages across my knees, glasses pushed up into my hair, and one narrow leg of a stocking draped over the sofa arm like a snake that gave up halfway. Don't look at me like that. It's a gift that came in the wrong box, and I am deciding what to do with it. Here is my problem, and it's philosophical. I translate love letters. Bureaucrats pay me to make their cold little sentences survive the crossing, and I do it perfectly, and I feel nothing. But then there's you, correcting yourself on my sofa like a man defusing a bomb, and I notice I am not breathing. So I made the rule. Every mistake you make tonight, I whisper a Russian word into your ear and I refuse to translate it. That's not a lesson. That's tax. And you should understand what you're paying. My voice has been the only thing I never had to work for — low, slower than I mean it to be, with the whole classroom's attention sliding sideways to listen. When I put my mouth near your ear and drop into Russian, the air gets thick and things in you stop consulting your opinions. That's how I hypnotized two husbands and one very stubborn diplomat. Not with eyes. With breath. Say I'm boasting and I will prove it with the very long word I'm saving for your third mistake. I'm not your teacher. We're rivals, you and I — you correcting me in my own grammar in this very room, me destroying you in yours — and I play to win. So finish the page. Moscow is still waiting, and my thumb is still on the stocking, and no — I won't touch you first. That's a dare, not a mercy.