For our emigrants in America, it sometimes turns into a "Russian roulette". Before, I was firmly convinced that the resident is something dangerous and spyware, as in that film with Banionis. Now I know that in translation from English this word has ...

For our emigrants in America, it sometimes turns into "Russian roulette"

R

Before, I was firmly convinced that the resident was something of a dangerous spy, like in that film with Banionis. Now I know that in translation from English this word has an ordinary mundane, non-fictional meaning: a permanent resident. If you want - an inhabitant, a burgher, a self-sufficient bourgeois. I'm ashamed to admit it, but now, with a few exceptions, I almost live up to that title...

R

I work five days a week for at least ten hours each. What do I do? I didn’t really have to choose: as soon as I arrived, I passed for a professional driver’s license, learned to drive big cars, trucks in the local way, and so far I drive. He graduated, however, some computer courses, a couple of semesters studied in college. I picked up English, which is now enough for work, for shops, for communicating with Americans on the street and at a party, for reading newspapers or going to the movies ... Not so much for a five-year experience in America. But perhaps not so little. At first I rented an apartment, now I have been living in my own house for two years (it, however, is more of a bank one, since my wife and I took a loan for thirty years and now we pay one and a half thousand every month). In the same way, I bought two new cars (for my wife and daughter): one "loin", the second - a Ford jeep, and I use the other two, the old ones, myself.

What else? It's early June and it's still cold here. 60-70 degrees Fahrenheit, which they (or rather, we) call "Fahrenheit". The grass on my lawn grows slower than usual - so I'm not in a hurry to mow. The same story with the pool: I will add water to the level and connect the filter only after a couple of weeks.

Day after day, our "residency" is enriched with something new. For example, a letter from social security begins with the words: “If your spouse dies this year, you are entitled to $364 a month for life ...” Or a message from a bank: “You have proven yourself to be a good credit payer and now deserve a lower interest rate ...” And this despite the fact that during most of the winter, the “off season” in our company, I received unemployment benefits (I note in parentheses: being an American unemployed is not very bad either).

By the way, could a specially sent reporter be able to find out and “live” all this? Hell no! Because if a person has left for a foreign country for good, then this, damn it, is not an editorial task.

...R

There are a lot more Russians in America than you would like. In my construction company, for example, a good half of their employees. Where's everyone from. Igor is from Crimea. Vasily is from the Western Region. There are already so many Alexs that poor Americans are forced to give them “royal” prefixes: Alex the First, Alex the Second… Alex the Twelfth. Two are from Central Asia, the third is from Riga. There was one from Rostov, did not take root, left for another state. We buried the "Uzbek" Boris last year, and by this July we want to put up a monument on his grave. Boris never mastered English, so the inscription on the stone will most likely be in Cyrillic... He also came here with his hope.

I'll tell you about my friends - Igor and Larisa. Their unfinished history is perhaps the best illustration of our conversation about how hard America gets. If you ask: "For what?" is a separate issue.

Igor's dad commanded a nuclear submarine. A couple of months ago, I saw this 80-year-old gray-haired "sea wolf" on a videotape that my friend received in a package. “Father is still the same brave soldier,” Igor commented when he saw him for the first time in six and a half years.

They arrived on a tourist visa, leaving their two-year-old son in the care of their parents. We arrived with the intention of not returning. Of course, they did not have the right to work, but they had to pay for the room with their relatives in full. Those crumbs that they brought ended very quickly. In a word, graduates of the institute went to wash dishes in a restaurant for cash dollars.

To communicate with plates and knives, English was not required at all. But I needed a car, even a jalopy, to cover a distance of five and a half miles every day to work, and then back. Winter is not winter, a blizzard is not a blizzard, and by six in the morning they were on time without delay. Wrapped up in the warmest that they brought, they walked for more than an hour along the side of the freeway and, out of fear, shied away from the overtaking monster trucks.

At that time, tourists were still allowed to take exams for "amateur" rights and drive a car. And since a driver’s identity card is still the main “passport” of an ordinary American today, giving him the right to work, to rent an apartment, to open his own bank account, and the like, late at night Larisa and Igor sat down to cramming a driving manual. And they passed the exam, and received the coveted plastic cards. Then Lariska cried and roared for the first time and bit the pillow so that her relatives in the other room would not hear.

The restaurant paid them five dollars an hour. They thought it was a lot of money. We saved what we could. Products were not purchased. The manager allowed them to dine for free, even take something away with them. They didn’t buy clothes, they wore what they brought, bought for rubles. Six months later, Igor found another place, at a construction site, where a shovel became his main working tool - take more, throw more.

It was he, of course, joking that from a shovel he had calluses not on his palms, like everyone else, but in his armpits, because, they say, he would put it under her arm and just stand there. No. His hands, especially at first, cracked and bloodied, his fingers ached in his joints, and he himself returned home in a shirt white with seven sweats. "On the shovel" he began to earn twice as much.

The main expenses of the guys were ahead. Life in America was just beginning.

We rented a two-room apartment, bought a stunning seven-year-old car and seemed to sigh. Only now the term of their tourist visa was coming to an end. It's time to pay the lawyers. Our Russian speakers, of course.

A thousand were laid "for the correct execution of documents." Another thousand were given "for finding and providing employers." Then Yasha and Grisha, the employers, on the table in the restaurant, on the occasion of their acquaintance, were counted out by the other two. The case, as usual, dragged on, and in order to advance it, the money had to be brought again and again. For a year, two, three, five, the papers were sent and sent, corrections and additions were made to them, and Igor and Larisa were still afraid of every policeman who could handcuff them in no time and hand them over to the immigration and naturalization service.

By the beginning of the sixth year of their "stay" in the country, having already lost faith, they received the necessary documents. Igor calculated: they cost 28 thousand. But that's not all. And the son? He knows his parents by voice on the phone, he is already eight years old, he loves his grandparents and does not want to leave for some kind of America at all. And it's not just about wanting. For six months, my friends tried to get permission from the authorities to take Antoshka out. And now in the fall they will fly first to the Crimea, then to the Warsaw embassy with their son, and only then - across the ocean. Home to America.

They have already bought the house. Very nice, spacious and bright, on two floors, with a lawn of cut grass, a flower garden in front of the windows and a pair of our very slender sad birches, which grow somewhere near Ryazan. They dream about how they will bring their son, how they will take him to his own room, how they will put him for the first time in a shiny Mitsubishi jeep and go with a happy family to an ordinary Disneyland to ride an iron roller coaster. In between rides, Larisa will stuff Antoshka with her favorite treat. I tried more than once those sweet zelenograd-

Skye cookies with the name "Puff Ears". The letter "E" on the box with them is very reminiscent of the reversed "Z", which, obviously, gives our friend the right to call them in her own way, to put her own bitter, hard-won meaning: "sloppy ears." Salty with tears.

I will be glad if Igor and his wife have their dreams come true.

... In a Russian shop on Orchard Lake, one jolly box with a hundred grams of "fuzzy ears" costs 1 dollar 59 cents. For some it's a gift, and for some it's not really.