Are you European?

Okay, the story about Latvia. On the second morning my wife was in town, I took her to the T-Mobile store to get a phone. I already had an account through T-Mobile, it only made sense we get rolled over into a family plan. But when we got to the store, my wife didn't like any of the phones. She looked all around, looking suspiciously at each model, finding one too clunky, the other without style, a third without the right features. "God," she said. "This is all they have? In Russia, we may not be rich, but at least we have lots more phones to choose from."

About this time, one of the two clerks who worked at the store had finished with a customer and come over to us. She sort of leaned forward, to see more than my wife's profile, to get a look at her face, and asked if we needed any help. My wife said no, briefly explained the situation, still looking at the phones. Then the clerk, an ice-blonde with a sharply drawn face, asked another question. "Are you from Europe?" I'd spotted her the moment we walked in. She's from Finland, I'd thought. Gotta be. That hair, the face. But after my wife smiled, said no, she was from Russia, the T-mobile clerk said hello in perfect Russian, "Zdrastvuy," and went on to conduct the rest of their dialogue in what she said was a shared native language. She was from Latvia, had come here a little over a year ago, and was in her mid-twenties, like my wife. They quickly fell into laughing and smiling, walking around the store together. Occasionally, they broke off from their Russian to include me in the conversation. The clerk did this at one point to say, "Since we are neighbors, I will give you a deal. You can take a phone for free, and that way you can have one until you find another, in Russia perhaps, where they care more for fashion and style."

I didn't argue. The phone they'd settled on was supposed to be free only with a two-year contract, and we were signing up for only one and supposed to pay more than $100. So: my wife and I followed the clerk over to the counter, where we called up my account and my wife began to supply the information needed to put her onto it. The clerk and my wife got to talking in Russian again. I sat there, just biding my time. Then I heard something. The clerk had said something, making a motion with one hand that seemed to suggest a bouncer looking at a fake ID, turning it this way and that to check the holographic seal. She walked away to retrieve a print-out of our contract, and as she did, I asked my wife, "Did she just ask if you married for love or the card?" My wife said something like, "Gosh, you're getting good," and thank god she didn't have a reason to worry about any further translations, because I'd heard her answer -- "po lubvi" -- and it was the right one.

As for the clerk, her motives seemed more dubious. She'd come here on a fiancee visa, a little over a year ago, but already she was in the process of getting a divorce. "Won't you have to leave?" my wife had asked. But this clerk seemed well-versed in the many nuances of immigration law. "No, there are ways," she said. "We'll have to get coffee, I'll tell you everything."

It was kind of funny. I'd once defended Latvia to my wife, who would, perhaps jokingly, suggest she didn't want to visit the Baltic states, like I, because "they hate us there, especially in Latvia," a country which is anything but an openly multi-cultural state, requiring ethnic Russians to speak Latvian just as Russians once insisted Latvians speak the lingua franca of the Soviet Union, Russian. And then what happens when we finally meet a Latvian together? She's everything I should fear, like the filing a false abuse claim, a new option for the desperate or impatient (and the truly abused) which eliminates the two-year waiting period for a Green Card, and a quick friend to my wife.

One thing's for certain. There are lots of Russian-speakers in Los Angeles. I see magazins everywhere, then shops selling books and videos and gifts too. I can move out in any direction of the compass and find kefir within a mile or two. For tvorog and canadckaya smetana, I needn't go such a great distance.

So it seems like there will be plenty of Russian-speakers for my wife to befriend. I can only hope that if one is a Latvian, she provides me with a case study and nothing more.