Hyun Woo was chatting with a Russian woman on a language exchange app. We shall call her Gorkaya, as a sign of respect to a great Russian writer, Gorky. Gorkaya was the same age as Hyun Woo was, and as often is the case with Russian women around age thirty, she had already experienced a divorce. This Hyun Woo learned from the endless wall of Russian texts that she continued sending him.
According to Gorkaya, her ex-husband would grab her by the hair, beat her, and even throw a dish at her. He was a man who often doubted his wife’s fidelity. Though Gorkaya had written on her profile page that she wished to practice English, she never wrote or spoke anything in it. Their conversation went on strictly in Russian until it could no longer properly be called a conversation. She recounted her story while Hyun Woo, partly due to his lack of Russian skills and also due to the fatigue from reading messages in Russian non-stop, would from time to time only type answers like mne zhal, eto uzhasno: I am sorry, that is terrible.
At one point, she stopped typing and sent Hyun Woo three pictures. In two of them, her younger self was wearing a white dress with a stunning smile on the face. That is me from my first wedding, wrote Gorkaya. In the other picture, Gorkaya, now older, looked at Hyun Woo from the phone screen. That’s me now. I am worried about the wedding.
I cannot understand how someone could lay a hand on such a beautiful bride, answered Hyun Woo, politely. He casually took a selfie and sent it to Gorkaya, not out of non-linguistic interest in her but because he felt obliged. Normalno viglyadish, she wrote back. Her message literally translated into: you look normal. Although Hyun Woo knew all the Russian words in her reply, he could not comprehend the nuance of “normalno”.
Then he recognized that he had missed an implication in Gorkaya’s previous message and asked her if she was getting married soon. She answered straight away. Yes, today. Hyun Woo checked what time it would be around where Gorkaya lived. It was almost noon in her time zone.
The woman had been chatting with Hyun Woo for hours on her wedding day, talking about the sufferings she had endured in her previous marriage and her anxiety regarding the coming marriage. He felt something was off about her but did not express it. This time, answering his remark on her beauty in the wedding photos, Gorkaya wrote: I am not to blame. I have such looks.
Gorkaya’s marriage ceremony would start in hours, if not in minutes. Hyun Woo simply told her that this time everything would be okay and that he wished her all the happiness. She sent a few more messages on how anxious she still was, but Hyun Woo no longer put much effort in conversing with her. Soon, Hyun Woo’s phone became silent.
The next day, Hyun Woo received messages early in the morning. It was Gorkaya again. She said her second husband was now not in the bedroom but in the bathroom on their wedding night. The man had drunk too much at the wedding feast and was busy vomiting all night, and his wife was sending messages regarding how unhappy she felt about it to another man thousands of miles away, who had “normal” looks.
Hyun Woo did not answer to Gorkaya. He had not done anything to Gorkaya and had not even implied anything to her; yet he somehow felt that he could end up a caricatured character in her story of miseries. Thus he chose not to react to her. However, he did sense that his short-lived online acquaintance with Gorkaya might make a story worth writing.
And so he did write.
Today’s flash fiction is a work of autofiction. That is, everything I wrote is true as I remember it, besides that her name is Gorkaya. However, since I do not know her true last name, the Russian bride might truly be a Gorkaya.
If you enjoyed my work, you can buy me a cup of tea. I am not a coffee person, by the way.
I very much enjoyed this description of cross-cultural communication and the difficulty of understanding nuance in another language, especially by text!
How refreshing. This is a strange predicament you found yourself in. I once found myself mistaken for a mistress lol. It pays to be aware how far kindness one should permit.