The Unintentional Gift: Behold! The Russian Mail-Order Internet Bride>Act 1

I belong to a couple of Jewish online dating services; http://www.jdate.com/ and http://www.jewishcafe.com/ to be more precise. So in my ever present journey of trying to find a mate to take on as a wife or a lover, one kind of has to weed through the marshes in order to get to the right pond so to speak. Equally, when I received letters from women, particularly Russian women, I actually had the misfortune to at first believe that Russian women were actually interested in me for me other than my abilities to get them over to America for a nominal fee or a green card.

The letters all start off the same; something like: “Hello: perhaps you are looking for someone like me to suit yourself with. Well, I can cook, clean, take care of the babies while you are hard at work & make the home a cozy and warm place to be once you are home from the office.” Well, that sounds a little bit over-exaggerated, but after weeding though the form email letters that I’ve received and deciphering the bad & broken English, you get the idea. Usually with the letter, there’s an airbrushed photograph of themselves, posing provocatively, as if to catch your eye, kind of like what editors and photographers do in all those behind-the-counter men's magazines.

My first experience with the flood of potential Russian women came during summer 2004, the first one of several, whom I’ll refer to as “Nayda” showed up in my email box during a time when my life was about to be changed forever; I was secretly looking for a new apartment without telling my crazy landlady, while slowly but surely on the way out with a music teacher that eventually and perhaps intentionally drove me away.

Nayda & I corresponded for an even exchange a total of two letters before it became “serious” and her seriousness, even though it seemed convoluted or similar to an assignment from a school teacher was for me to write how romantic my neighborhood was at night.

Here is her descriptive letter of her neighborhood at night; I left her letter intact, spelling errors abound, with corrections in parenthesis when appropriate.

“Hi,

Thank you for your letter a lot. Frankly speaking I didn't think that you will answer me so fast. But I am really glad that today I can read your letter. Your message seemed very interesting to me. And I will write you my answer now. The whether (weather) is very good outside today. It is very shiny and there are no clouds. Even there is no wind at all. And the temperature is not so high, near 26 degrees of celsium (Celsius). I like such whether very much. I do not know are your night are like ours, but you can compare them, I will tell you about ours. Just imagine that you are going on a street, it is 1 am and there is nobody near you. You just walk and you even do not know where you walk. There is no wind at all. There is no noise, and only somewhere very far you can hear the train going. And most beautiful is that there are a lot of birds singing their songs. Night songs are more beautiful something special. It is like a food for your brain. You just go and listen to them. The sky is crystal clear. There is no even a little cloud on it. Only millions stars. Some of them are bright, some not, some big some small. You can even see some different colored stars, sometimes green, red & yellow.

It is very dark and only the moon light your way. You can see the houses, the light in the windows, because someone is celebrating some party and do not sleep. You look at this window and see that party goes well there, that everyone is happy there; they are loughing (laughing). And iven (even) if your mood is not very good in this moment, it becomes better and better, because you see that people near you are happy, and you feel yourself happy too.

You can hear the trees, they are singing songs too. They tells (tell) you something, but you do not understand them. You go near an hour, but you are not tired, because the night gives you power to go. In this moments you have a lot of time to think. To think about everything, about your life, about your soulmate, about really everything.

I think that it is very romantic to walk under the summer night sky that is full of stars. But I want to walk so with my soulmate, with the man of my dream. I really hope that someday it will become true. What do you think? Are your summer nights like ours? I am sure that no (you know). Please, tell me something about it, ok? Nadya.”

So, I thought about what Nayda wrote and it seemed as if she had lifted several lines from a romantic novel and just had a hard time describing herself, but overall did a great job. And then I thought; what could I possibly write to compare? I could have easily sent a portion of one of my many self-description paragraph-sketches that I have written on the fly or something to that effect, but then I thought about the honesty of it all. After all, I did want to be honest to her and mostly myself. So I thought about it for a while and then I thought of my neighborhood on a Saturday night. Not always the greatest place to be on Saturday night either, as my landlady’s residence was right in the middle of a gang-banger war-zone.

So I wrote her back and said, “Nadya, your description of the night is beautiful, very beautiful, in fact like a story teller, it makes me feel as if I am there in your city. You have a beautiful mind, Nadya, like a well-seasoned writer. I mean this as a compliment to you.”

Then I wrote a small descriptive paragraph, again leaning toward honesty. I wrote, “Our summer nights are sometimes different, but are similar. Sometimes on clear nights, outside of my apartment you can see many stars and hear the laughter of teenagers in the park across the street way past their curfew, a few dogs barking & perhaps a cop car or two whizzing past heading to the familiar troubled spots. This summer's weather has been unusually cool and rainy, but I’m not complaining. I’m not a big fan of hot weather; I’m there in the middle, kind of like West Coast weather in the United States, which is always cool in year round.

Nadya, in all honesty, my neighborhood is the last place I’d want to be on a Saturday night or a weekend for that matter. It is considered very dangerous as too many cop cars fly past my window with the lights flashing and more than likely half-a-dozen more cars to follow, more than likely breaking up a gang fight, a robbery or a teenagers causing a disturbance.

My landlady’s home was targeted one night a few weeks ago, when somebody took a flowerpot of hers on the porch and just threw it straight through a side window in a side room where she keeps her computer. Even last Christmas Day night it was broken into in the basement portion where I lived, but nothing was taken. Because of the stupidity of my landlady of not having an address on her building, it took the police department 25 minutes to arrive. By then the offender had escaped.

My landlady of course was sunning herself in Brazil & really didn’t care and showed her true colors when she returned home when she never even bothered to thank me for repairing the damage to her window that was kicked in or even offered to reimburse me for my efforts. In fact she said nothing. Okay, okay, Nayda, I’m rambling a bit, but in all honesty, this is what my neighborhood can be like…”

And of course, I never did hear back from Nayda again.

But you know something? In a way I was kind of relieved.