Still alive!

Перевод на английский рассказа "Still alive!"


More than once or twice a day, people ask me:

- How are you?

I usually don’t overthink it and answer simply:

- Good! And you?

That’s the standard reply. Some people get creative with their answers. I’ve heard:

- Never better!

As in, never been better. One coworker even says:

- I am blessed.

Blessed—by God, of course.

There are other non-standard responses to the simple “How are you?”, but I don’t go looking for them. Sometimes, something comes over me and I respond differently—but only if the person asking is someone I know well:

- Good. I'm still alive!

This usually throws people off. What does it mean? If they take it as a complaint, then I must be a loser. Someone to steer clear of. But then they see a smile on my face, and think—maybe it’s a joke? But they don’t get the joke, which again makes them think it's best to avoid this kind of jokester in the future.

But for me, those words are full of spirit and defiance.

I heard them during our early months after arriving in America. We didn’t speak English then, didn’t know anything about how things worked here, and had no one to explain even the basics.

Every morning, I went to what was called the “labor exchange,” where crowds of Russian-speaking undocumented workers offered their unskilled labor on the street of Borough Park. This was in 1996. Programming courses were starting to pop up. But at the same time, among the guys at that street, there was a solid belief that the demand for programmers was temporary. “They” just needed to fix the Y2K problem, and once that was done, all the programmers would be out on the street again.

I was earning less than we needed just to get by. I saw no future ahead and tried not to think about it. One day, a man named Wole — a Pole — picked me up for a job. He gave me work in his smack company, and also asked if I could help some friends of his on Sunday—for money, of course.

It was a group of cheerful, likeable young Polish guys. Next to them, I — a 46-year-old former Soviet engineer who had spent his whole life working in design companies felt like an old loser. They brought me to Queens, where I had never been to.

There stood a two-story house with an attic, in a dirty, depressed neighborhood. It looked like it had been abandoned for years—or maybe it had burned down. Probably both. Around the house was a yard full of garbage.

- My friends bought this house to fix it up and sell it, - Wole told me. He was the only one who could speak any Russian at all.

Inside, under all the filth and decay, the house still held traces of former grandeur: oak wall panels, spiral stair rails topped with pinecone-shaped finials. All of it charred.

My job was to strip the roof. On a big, scorched table lay what looked like a climbing harness. I put it on, and along with a couple of the Polish guys, tied a rope to something “secure”—whatever we could find—and climbed out through the attic windows onto the roof.

There we stood, on the steep slope of the roof, ropes pulled tight, using tools like scrapers to peel off the old roofing made of multiple layers of tar paper. Six or seven layers, one on top of the other, each nailed down. It helped that the nails were thick and short—they didn’t hold much. But even so, I couldn’t keep up with the young guys, no matter how hard I tried.

They worked playfully, tearing off whole sheets of fused material, which then had to be broken down into pieces—because we had to carry all that to the dumpster ourselves.

Ah, those guys were full of life! Maybe they dreamed of the big profit they’d make selling the renovated house. What profit, I think now, looking back. A house like that, even fixed up, cost maybe $200,000 that year. Subtract $80,000 they paid for it, another $50,000 for repairs—that leaves $70,000 to split between all the partners. That kind of job had to be done in a couple of months to be worth it. Or maybe they had to do several of these houses at once. Back then, though, people earned little and lived modestly.

Today, that house would be worth a couple of million. Most likely, it’s been torn down and replaced with a fancy condo. That whole neighborhood has gone upscale.

I liked those guys. By evening, I was exhausted. It was already dark—it was October. Everyone started scooping up construction debris into plastic barrels. Around the house, at the second-story level, were scaffolds. Well—“scaffolds” isn’t quite the right word. They were made of ladders with planks laid across them—sometimes plywood sheets, sometimes old doors, supported by flimsy wooden strips. No railings. Everything wobbled underfoot, barely attached to the house. You could punch right through a rotten panel if you stepped wrong. We walked those planks in the dusk, like ants in a line, each of us carrying a barrel of debris. At the dumpster, we’d dump it, then loop around to get another one.

So there I was, walking along a shaky board, hugging my barrel. The distant lighting cast only silhouettes. A tall guy was walking ahead of me with his own barrel. Suddenly, he disappeared. Boards flew up into the air ahead of me, and the whole section of scaffold right in front of me collapsed with a crash. I was standing on the edge of a gaping hole.

The ant line froze. Below us was a trash heap full of bricks and boards with nails sticking out, and something was moving down there. It was too dark to see anything clearly, only vague sounds came from the pile. I was terrified, running through every awful possibility in my head.

- Zbyszek, are you okay? - someone asked hesitantly after a long pause.

- Still alive! - came a voice from the darkness—with a tone that mocked the idea that anything serious might have happened. And Zbyszek climbed back up onto the intact part of the scaffold in front of me, placing his barrel up first.

To my surprise, no one stopped working. The scaffolding was patched back together like nothing had happened—no safer than before. We resumed the work and finished clearing the house.

Later we drove through Greenpoint in the dark. We stopped somewhere, and Zbyszek picked up a couple of boxes of beer. When it got to me, I declined. They’d promised me $50 for the day—less than what my family needed to get through one day. Beer? No thanks.

- It’s free, - Zbyszek said. So I took a bottle and sat there drinking it, looking out the window at the Polish signs. What a great day! What bad thing could possibly happen to us, with such great people around, in such a cheerful country?

Since then, the phrase “Still alive!” has rung like a little bell in my mind—full of optimism. What else can you say when someone asks:

- How are you?

To be fair, I should honestly mention that the same Wole stiffed me out of a week’s pay a couple of months later. I was lucky—he fired me the moment I complained about the delay. Others, who were more patient, lost two weeks’ worth. The most trusting ones—three.

But that didn’t change how I saw that world.

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