All we wanted was a dozen eggs. Nothing more, nothing less.

After watching the Hollywood sci-fi The Island, dubbed in Russian with Ukrainian subtitles (up until now, I don’t know the storyline of this film) at a posh cinema in Kiev, we felt like buying eggs at the 24-hour corner store. Eggs I could fry or boil for breakfast in our dusty, rented apartment in the capital city of Ukraine (paying lots of moolah to be able to sleep with dust mites is a historical event that should never be repeated in the future).

And so, from the Politekhnichnyi Instytut subway station, we headed straight to the corner store situated near our apartment building. Once inside, we approached the lady in her fifties, who was manning the store.

“We would like to buy a dozen eggs, please,” I told the shopkeeper with a smile.

She couldn’t understand what I was saying. So my husband said in simple, slow English, “Eggs. Do you have eggs here?” Clearly, it was not his intention, but he made it sound like he was talking to an idiot.

No clear response. Just the look of confusion.

To ease up the process of communication, the shopkeeper then started pointing at various goods stacked on the shelves at random. Pointing at the bread section, she waited for our response. We shook our heads and replied, “Nyet” (Russian for “no”). Then she pointed at the milk cartons, to which we replied, “Nyet.” Looking hopeful, she pointed at the meat products. “Nyet,” we chorused. A lot of “Nyets” were uttered that night.

I suggested to my husband to speak to the lady in German, or even in French. Just to give it a try and see if it would work.

He did. But we were greeted with the same clueless facial expression.

We then tried the unthinkable: we flapped both our arms wildly as if they were chicken wings and we matched it with a loud chicken sound (I was inwardly impressed with the power of our voice talents combined). I capped our “performance” with a pantomime showing that I was a mother hen laying an egg. I then showed to the shopkeeper the invisible egg, cupped in my hands.

While all this was taking place, another customer, a middle-aged man, entered the store and saw us communicating this way and watched us in amusement. The shopkeeper, meanwhile, was laughing hysterically all this time. Her face was red all over.

But my husband and I were dead serious. We wanted our eggs.

The newly arrived man then offered us his help. Semi-drunk, he told us he could speak a little bit of English. We felt a little bit relieved, but part of us doubted his capacity to do impromptu translation work in his drunken state. Just the same, perhaps out of desperation, we asked him to please tell the lady we wanted some eggs. He happily “translated” our order from English to Russian. The shopkeeper, who was still recovering from her fits of laughter, then went to the fridge to get an unopened bottle of water.

When she showed it to us from afar, my husband exclaimed, “Nyet! Nyet!” Funny, I could have sworn: my husband suddenly sounded like a frustrated child on a brink of having a tantrum.

So I had an idea. I got my mini notepad and pen from my bag, and tried to draw a picture of an egg. My husband praised me for my quick thinking, and told me that this would finally work. I felt, too, that this was going to be the cutting-edge solution to our current linguistic problem.

But when I showed my grade school sketch to the lady, she just nodded her head, smiled, and insisted in Russian that she understood what we meant. She finally handed the bottle of water to us over the glass counter. The man beside us seemed pleased with his translation.

“She thought you drew a drop of water, not an egg,” my husband whispered to me. He then tried to draw his own egg version, and then presented it to the lady.

“Da, da,” she replied. Da, in Russian, means yes.

Already tired from the lost-in-Russian-dubbing cinema experience we just had prior to the store visit, I let go of the struggle and told my husband to just buy the bottle of water. Not just one, but two. “Just to get it done and over with,” I muttered.

On the way out, my husband said in total disbelief: “How can they not see that we’ve drawn an egg?”

We just wanted a dozen eggs. Who would have thought that it would be that complicated? (Kiev, Ukraine/August 2005)

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