An expat reflects

There are lots of good reasons to read Olen Steinhauer’s second edition of the Monocle, his occasional newsletter: his thoughts on Ken Bruen and Kevin Wignall, news of his latest projects, and a brief spiel about his biggest influences. But the biggest reason is the next installment in “The Errant Compass” where he delves into the feelings of dissociation he has as an American writer living abroad. Communication is a huge issue, as he relates in this excerpt:

My Hungarian circle is made up primarily of English-speaking expats, but half-living is far from being only an Anglo phenomenon. When, in 1991, my girlfriend arrived in Budapest from Yugoslavia, she didn’t speak a word of Hungarian, and still couldn’t after three years. After twelve years, though, she speaks a kind of machine-gun Hungarian that, she tells me, Hungarians usually don’t quite get.

But she has the same trouble with me. Although she’s spent much of her time with English-speakers, she’s never really spoken it herself, and once we’ve been together a few weeks and are out meeting with mutual friends who’ve known her much longer than I have, they lean forward and say, “I never knew you spoke English!” She speaks it like she speaks Hungarian—tentatively, with sudden bursts of charming grammatical errors (More one cigarette then we go…I must to pee…I was in the shock!) that sometimes throw her entire meaning into question.

We are from different worlds, neither from the one we’re living in. She tells me stories of the early ’nineties in Novi Sad, her hometown, the anti-war demonstrations ringed by Milosevic’s secret policemen who wrote down names and carted off demonstrators in the dead of night; waking to soldiers at the foot of her bed who dragged her husband back to the front; arranging forged papers when they finally decided to escape. These laboriously communicated stories, working through the language barrier, nonetheless hold me transfixed. She tells me that, after Milosevic, she has a deep hatred of euphoria; she’s seen what crowds can do when euphoria has taken hold of them. I look down at my gin and tonic and nod, as if I understand.

All I can say is, just read the rest. It’s making me reflect on my fleeting moments as a stranger in a strange land, and why, most of the time, I gravitate towards sticking to English-speaking countries.