Chapter 1

After college, I spent a year in Slovenia, a small, rather obscure Central European country. This was in the very beginning of the 90s, shortly after big regime changes had swept the whole region, and there was, to put it mildly, a lot of stuff going on.

I was hungry for adventure and wanted to throw myself in the middle of things, and one of the rules I made up for myself was that I wasn’t going to speak any English - I would learn to speak Slovene, come hell or high water. Actually, in theory I was 90% of the way there already, having had four years of university studies in Slavic languages, including a year of Serbo-Croatian, which was closely related to Slovene and widely understood (if not always appreciated) in Slovenia.

But theory and practice are two different things. I could make myself understood, but I had almost no conversational experience outside of classes and, being a fairly shy person, I found it rather difficult in the beginning to make friends. I’d just headed over there, outside of any formal framework and without a real plan of what I was going to do, knowing that I could survive for quite a while on my modest savings — the dollar went a long way over there in those days. I had to force myself to go out and meet people. That had never come easily to me — I wasn’t the sort just to go into a club or bar and hang out — and being less than confident in my language skills didn’t make it any easier.

The fact of the matter is, had I not been so concerned that people would want to befriend me just because I was American, I would have had a much easier time of it. There were comparatively few Americans, especially young ones, in the country at that time, and any foreigner from a Western country attracted interest in the university town where I was living. At least in the beginning, it must have been fairly obvious to anyone that I was from the States — from my name, dress, mannerisms, and accent when I tried to speak the language. People often tried to practice their English with me, or ask questions about US culture, and I’m afraid I was often a bit of a jerk about it, sometimes going so far as to pretend not to know any English. I was worried that if I got into English-language conversations I’d never improve in Slovene.

Of course I did make friends, mostly among the university student population, especially as I was auditing some classes and otherwise spending time at the university. I used to hang out with a bunch of guys, for example, whom I got to know when they asked me for help translating death metal lyrics. I had precisely zero interest in that genre of music but it was fun trying to find the right Slovene words for all that brutal stuff - we all learned a lot. A few of them were forming their own band and even invited me to help them write and correct their lyrics (for some reason I never quite understood, they “sang” or rather shrieked in English, not Slovene), so I got to be a guest of honor at lots of local clubs where I had to discreetly cover my ears and pretend I was enjoying the clamor.

Anyway, after I’d been there a couple of months, I was getting worried that, despite all the death metal translations, my conversational Slovene wasn’t progressing fast enough. It was too easy to get along with my limited Croatian and slip back into English when necessary. So I put up a notice on a bulletin board at the Faculty of Pedagogy, explaining that I was looking for a tutor and stating the days and hours I could be found at the library (there was no phone in the room I’d rented).

A few days later Marta, a student of Slovene linguistics, came to find me. She was friendly and outgoing, and quite happy to undertaking meeting me three times a week to review the finer points of vocabulary and grammar and practice conversation. She wasn’t afraid to correct me, even in our initial conversation, when I let “Croatianisms” slip into my Slovene, which was often.

Best of all, she claimed not to speak any English, so I wouldn’t be tempted to fall back on that crutch. I later found out that she could actually read and understand English quite well, but wasn’t confident about speaking it. In any case, she and I never spoke anything but Slovene; in the beginning, because I was paying her to tutor me, and later, because — having spoken Slovene from the beginning — it would have been unthinkable to switch languages.

Marta was a wonderful teacher. She loved her native tongue and was thrilled that an American (who didn’t even have any Slovenian ancestry) was trying to learn it; but she also had a strong background in general linguistics, and a good grasp of the things that made Slovene difficult for foreigners. For example, it’s necessary to use special forms of nouns and verbs when talking about two things (as opposed to more than two, or only one). I knew about these forms, of course, but using them didn’t come naturally to me (they’re not used in standard Croatian) and I often messed up. She’d always patiently correct me and it became a joke between us, for example, when I used the wrong “we” — she’d ask if she wasn’t enough for me, did I want a “trojka” (threesome)?

We’d started our sessions in the library, but soon we were spending the time walking around the beautiful town of Maribor. She’d ask me to describe everything we saw in Slovene, helping me when I didn’t have the vocabulary — her method was never to tell me the word outright, but rather wait until I had tried to paraphrase what I wanted to say, then casually slip the right word into her own conversation. (I’ve taught various languages since then and have always tried to emulate her methods.)

Inevitably, Marta and I started to become friends. I continued paying her for thrice-weekly sessions, but we were seeing each other almost every day — getting coffee here, having lunch there, going to museums or concerts, sometimes with her girlfriends, sometimes just by ourselves. (“Will I need the dual or the plural ‘we’,” I would ask jokingly, when she would suggest an outing.)

It’s hard to explain, but the word “friend” (prijatelj) isn’t thrown around as casually in Slovenia as it is in the US. You wouldn’t use it about someone you were just getting to know. The first time Marta introduced me as her friend was several months after we’d met, one evening when we went to get coffee and listen to jazz with two other girls I hadn’t met yet, and it hit me like a brick. It felt like a huge step, and I was kind of light-headed about it all evening.

As the fall term wore on, we spent even more time together. Under Marta’s tutelage, and of course hanging out with her and her friends (mostly girls, it seemed to me) almost every day, I was quickly becoming fluent. I was even able to have relatively technical discussions about linguistics with Marta — while I’d majored in Slavic studies, not linguistics per se, I’d had plenty of exposure and found it an interesting topic — and when she had to read through a large set of stiflingly boring papers in English, and a few in Russian for her term paper, I volunteered to help. I understood the topic — we’d discussed it at length — and I could abstract the important points and summarize them for her.

Marta accepted my offer of help but insisted she should pay me for my time. I was of course shocked by that, and in fact rather dismayed; we were friends, after all — how could she not understand that I would gladly help her? But she quite reasonably pointed out that I was still paying her weekly for tutoring me in Slovene. We actually had a small argument about it — I said that was totally different, she was a professional teacher (or at least studying to be one), and I could easily afford it (I definitely should not have said this).

Finally when we’d each had our say I realized that she felt embarrassed that I was still paying her for what to her didn’t feel like formal lessons anymore (it was true; even during our supposed lesson times we were, by that point, just hanging out and enjoying each other’s company), and I had the presence of mind to propose the simple solution that she, for whatever reason, was reluctant to voice: we’d stop the pretense of “lessons,” and I’d help her with her paper as a friend, and we’d be “even.” She looked relieved, and so for a couple of weeks I got to work my butt off trying to make sense of the highly technical articles she had to read for her paper, and helping her compose her thoughts. I was pretty good at term papers in college and knew that having the general structure of your thesis down pat before you started writing was half the battle.

Marta lived in a sort of dormitory with seven roommates, and by roommates I do actually mean roommates — there were eight beds to a room. I’d been up there with her and her friends a couple of times, but it was completely impractical as a place to study and we had mostly been working in the library, which wasn’t open late. As the deadline for her paper approached, it seemed prudent to keep working evenings. I had a small but quiet room to myself in town, with a fairly big desk and couple of chairs, and one evening as we left the library I suggested she come over so that we could work there.

She had picked me up outside the house, but never been up to my room - I’d invited her a few times to come up for coffee, but she always demurred. This time, too, she refused. I was a bit perplexed; I wasn’t suggesting anything improper, was I? I just figured we both had a few more hours of useful work in us and shouldn’t pack it in so early. I remembered crunch time in my own university - people would stay up until the wee hours writing their term papers.

Marta suggested we just go out and get ice cream, which was a fun idea, but not getting us any closer to finishing her paper. We had a nice time that evening, but after I had taken her back to her dorm and walked the half mile to my lodgings, I was seriously worrying about whether we’d be able to finish on time. I couldn’t really figure out why she’d been so adamant about not coming up to my place. Surely she didn’t expect me to, I don’t know, take advantage of her?