English Plus was previously a finishing academy that cloned self-effacing, mainly female, interpreters to conceal the odd genuine spy. Last year I returned from summer holidays to find the gender ratio reversed, my father ensconced as principal and the place crawling with Levi-clad entrepreneurs managing joint ventures with Western partners, their brick-sized mobile phones trussed to hips; fashion accessories gifted from my father’s new American pals as opposed to a functioning appliance. A public mobile network is at least two years away, the car-phone still the preserve of the elite. Impatient with grammatical intricacies, they demand dollops of business lexicon to lubricate transactions abroad. They or their companies pay handsomely. My salary increases, reliably dispensed in Uncle Sam greenbacks.
EP’s recipe – genius really – is Anglophilia plus timing. Stir in my mild presence. ‘Liquid, you’ll find your level,’ is my father’s growling mantra and so it proves. In place of sudden-death exams at semester’s end, courses are shortened to six weeks, staggered oral and written assessment introduced and attendance virtually guaranteeing certificates, although almost without exception my go-getting students perform well above mediocre.
I once read a photo feature in a back copy of National Geographic about greyhound racing in the USA. Kentucky, I think it was. Might have been California. With my club-tongued consonants, I’m EP’s electric rabbit. The quicker dogs never catch me but have every right to think they will. The gap between my students’ English ability and mine is such that just as they are about to outstrip me, the course ends. My job entails handing out corporate role-play scenarios my father devises, adjudicating presentations, ticking attendance rolls, preparing and marking take-home assignments. To my sessional colleagues, creeping career death. One by one they trade salary for professional satisfaction, relative penury here and theoretical prospects of advancement elsewhere, leaving me as the linchpin.
Yet teaching and learning another language is in essence an uplifting enterprise, particularly for English Plus’s clientele. The real lesson is enforced empathy, first of all towards their classmates. Keeping faith with immersion theory the first class is the educational equivalent to a dip in an ice-hole after a birch sauna. Humility and, hoping against hope, collective redemption begins with oral aerobics. Two minutes maximum introduction each, one minute the usual average, for names, age, occupation and qualifications. The less advanced students recite from their passport pages. Others suppress giggles at their mangled syntax and pebble-in-mouth pronunciation. They determine not to repeat their mistakes, amplify them and throw in more for good measure. Ten minutes in, pride in puddles at their feet, they bond into syndicates for the role-plays, lately inspired by or connected to my father’s sojourn in Australia as an exchange scholar years ago, his only trip West.
Example: an Australian delegation arrives in Moscow to discuss further wheat shipments. Typically, the Russian side has not made good on payments to date. To revive the negotiations, far less conclude the deal, you must first apologise for dishonoured letters of credit and present a counterproposal with upfront deposits. This is an exercise in reparations. Serious profit is out of the question.
Still, why Australia? A consolation prize, surely. America is my father’s unrequited love. His bags were packed for a six-month exchange in Connecticut when the 1979 Afghan invasion plunged superpower relations into deep freeze and his visa was annulled. But as far as I know, which isn’t very much, Australia is Britain’s severed appendix or – the harsher interpretation – lowlife dumping ground. It offends the diehard patriot in me that my Russian side is always mendicant or contrite. My father has tapped a vein of guilt. Has this irritation seeped into my performance? Led to complaints?
On floor six, I key 21061944 into the code panel. For the uninitiated, the birthday of Ray Davies, Kinks songwriter still going strong. Weekly I alternate British date/month/year and American month/date/year. Crack that, KGB. Last year’s Cambridge student gifted me The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society. ‘A criminally neglected work of genius, more English than London Bridge. Consider yourself founder of the Moscow Kinks Preservation Society.’ The next day I played Village Green five times nonstop, its polyphonic brilliance rooted in English folk, then started on the entire Lennon/McCartney hit catalogue from Love Me Do to Let It Be… and stopped at Sergeant Pepper. Eat Kinks’ dust, Beatles.
The door swings open to a generous foyer in polished Baltic pine. Glossy prints and posters adorn the walls: London Tower swathed in light cloud, Oxford students punting on a willow-strewn Thames, a bobby craning forward like a solicitous waiter. British civilisation, a sub-aural music, fills the silence, my current batch of students having completed their final tests yesterday. My conditioned impulse is to offer my passport as though I've landed at Heathrow.
Tucked to the right is the administration desk where Rita sits. A fortyish blonde, Sergey’s proxy, gatekeeper, photocopier extraordinaire and linguistic enforcer, the high point of her day is screaming U nas nel’zya govorit na russkom – tol’ko na angliyskom!! Far more arresting than Spik inglish, no rahshan heer! Among the procession of carpenters, painters and scaffolders hoisting ladders, plasterers punching and smoothing apertures between classroom walls to realise my father’s semi-open architectural plan, Russian is the whispered language of the colonised. In this rarified space querulous Russian inflection, even muffled, signals fisticuffs. English gropes towards a handshake. Is it English itself or just the siren song of the exotic? I have no third language as reference point, but it comforts me to imagine that even if the school was closed down, some trace will live on. An airborne enclave of Empire a cannon volley away from an oblivious Kremlin – delicious. I’d better savour it.
A TV-sized IBM my father bought on the black market and installed last month, for last-minute assignment corrections and printing out on the Xerox-and-fax-in-one, illuminates the far corner where its cantankerous predecessor spat out perforated dots. When the technicians left, my father dragged over a second chair, beckoned me over. We sat transfixed before the screensaver – an Akula (Shark) submarine stalking a Daniel Boone, circling its twinkling wake.
‘The West calls it the information superhighway. In a year or two we’ll be exchanging electronic pleasantries with the old archenemy in real time. But let’s start with my Australian mate.’
Deft keystrokes conjured a field that expanded from its text with deckled top and side-menus. In the Subject box my father typed A SUMMARY OF THE SCIENTIFIC, TECHNOLOGICAL AND SOCIOECONOMIC LEGACY OF THE UNION OF SOVIET SOCIALIST REPUBLICS. Leaving the contents page blank, he hit Send. The message disappeared. Pausing a minute, he swivelled the cursor to the Inbox icon, an unopened envelope in paler blue, down to (1) beside New Mail. Wiggling inside the parentheses he double-clicked, and… Message received comrade. The USSR is mighty but no match for Microsoft. Just quietly. Cheers, David E. Woo-hoo!
Sergey high-fived me, his technophobic heir, like the Harlem Globetrotters.
Australia is tucked away at the end of the sixth-floor corridor, past the janitor’s cupboard. My watch says 11.57 am. I have just three minutes and twenty metres to prepare myself. My father’s office door is, unusually, half open. A steel bollard with vinyl Australian coat of arms greets visitors – winged green and gold pennants, kangaroo, complete with fat joey clambering from the pouch, mum roo’s folded arms suggesting not before time, and emu facing off. Down Under parties, my father holding court, Slim Dusty twanging on the turntable while he explains why Slim is Australian quintessence, take place once a month. I attend only when I can’t concoct a plausible alibi.