Fifteen Grams Please

November 29, 2005

As I had predicted, Russia is not the most suitable place for people who don’t eat pork. The deli in every store is 99 percent pork: sausages, salamis, hot dogs and sardelki (extremely thick, short hotdogs that look like the fingers of a fat giant, and are so good that they could break a Chassidic rabbi). One day during work, I took a little break and walked over to a small supermarket down the street. They too had a large assortment of pork products, so I decided to ask the saleswoman for help. I must preface this by saying that am mortified of Russian saleswomen and try to avoid contact with them at any cost. But, seeing as there was nobody else in the store, I decided to face my fear.

‘Do you have anything made of beef?’ I asked. She answered not in words, but with an irritated nod of the head and an even more irritated pointing gesture with her middle finger. I must admit, that although in Russia the middle finger is used much like our pointer finger, it still offends me.

There were three different beef options and I could tell that she was displeased at the fact that I had already been staring at them for five seconds and hadn’t yet made up my mind. The names of the meats were written in cursive. Reading cursive in Russian is already a problem for me, but this kind of pressure made it physically impossible. I pointed (with my pointer finger) to the topmost slab of meat, and prepared myself for the worse question of all: ‘how much?’. This always makes me panic. I still don’t really know how much a gram is, but I do know how much 200 grams is because of a previous purchase I made with Tamara’s help. Based on that, I tried to calculate how much one slice would be: after all, I only wanted to try it.

‘How much?’ she asked.

‘Fifteen grams,’ I said confidently, feeling like a true Russian.

Before she was able to speak, she looked at me as though I had murdered her firstborn -- she may have even twitched. The fact that I speak Russian with little-to-no accent always gets me into this kind of trouble: people can’t tell that I’m not Russian, and so, are understandably appalled when I don’t know mundane ‘Russian’ things.

‘Fifteen grams?!’ she yelled in astonishment, enunciating every syllable. ‘I can’t cut fifteen grams, are you mocking me?!’

‘No,’ I answered. ‘I just want enough to try it.’ She was livid, and the madder she got, the more calm I got, which infuriated her even more.

‘You can’t just try it here!’

‘I know, but is it ok if I buy it and then try it?’ I asked irreverently. Her unjustified hysteria was forcing disrespect out of me against my own will.

At this point, it was quite clear that she was not going to slice me 15 grams, so I decided to up the stakes.

‘Fine, make it 20,’ I said, sure that I had successfully resolved the conflict. But it was too late, our relationship was forever ruined. The veins near her temples became more and more defined with each passing moment. She yanked the meat out of the case with unbridled hostility. Meanwhile, I was just relieved to be on the opposite side of the counter.

She removed the plastic wrap from the meat and placed it on the slicing machine, all the while talking to herself, about me, out loud:

‘She wants me to cut 15 grams…I can’t believe this…she’s insane…the scale won’t even be able to measure 15 grams.’

I had no idea that working behind a deli counter could be so stressful. But she was right: I did not factor the minimum measuring capability of a scale into my calculations.

She swung around and showed me one lonely slice of meat lying on a small Styrofoam slab. ‘That’s it?’ she asked, in a patronizing tone.

‘Oh, what the hell, give me another slice,’ I said like a millionaire. She couldn’t take it anymore and emitted a nervous laugh, clearly rehearsing to herself how she was going to tell all of her friends about the moron that came into the store today.

She was turned with her back to me, slicing away, when I decided to salvage what was left of her sanity:

‘I’m sorry, it’s just that I came from America and I don’t know your grams yet.’

She swung around and glowered at me: my explanation was totally lost on her, and only aggravated the situation further. She wrapped my meat-on-Styrofoam and flung it at me across the counter. She was so angry that she didn’t even say goodbye.

As I walked towards the cashier, I checked the label to see how far off I was from my initial 15-gram estimate, and much to my delight, my two slices added up to 32 grams. I was very pleased with myself, and even considered going back to the saleswoman to flaunt my near-perfect accuracy. ‘Maybe,’ I thought, ‘this would force her to reconsider denigrating people for no good reason. I could convince her to calm down—not be so angry.’ But then I decided that I had caused enough pain for one day and made my way to the cash register. Not paying much attention, the cashier took my merchandise off the conveyer belt, but feeling how light it was, she turned to look at it. She glanced at the pitiful purchase, and then up at me, the pitiful purchaser. She rolled her eyes, let out a patronizing smile, and wrung me up.