Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, July 16, 1993 TAG: 9307160151
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: B8 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: SCOTT BLANCHARD STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: CENTREVILLE LENGTH: Long
It's Monday, it's almost 100 degrees, the air is soggy and Alex Ryjik is driving through lunchtime Northern Virginia traffic in an old Pontiac Bonneville, cracked windshield, no air conditioning.
For Ryjik, a former fencing champion three years removed from the now- dissolved Soviet Union, life is grand.
Or, precisely, life is life.
The 25-year-old from Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) with dark-brown kinky hair and mustache and a slope-shouldered, sturdy-legged body, leans back in a recliner in his three-floor townhouse.
"My point in my life is to change who I was there, to change completely, to become a different person," Ryjik said. "I was a jerk, I was a liar, I was a stealer, I was a very bad person. Not because of me, because everybody around were like this.
"Main point, and I always tell people, I like to say this: You know what I enjoy more about my life here right now? I have no secrets. I swear to God, I have, like, no secrets from you. I have nothing to hide."
Ryjik will speak at today's 8 p.m. opening ceremonies for the Commonwealth Games of Virginia at Victory Stadium, and there's no guessing what he will say.
He could talk about winning an age-group Soviet fencing championship in 1986 when he was 18. Maybe about studying under former Olympic and world champion fencer Edward Vinokyrov. Perhaps about his Soviet Army championship.
Or his American friends, who range from a 6-year-old student to 45-year-old Sandy Harris, who describes herself as "somewhat overweight" and says, "If he can teach me, he can do anything." Harris was part of the women's sabre team that won a silver medal at last month's national tournament in Fort Myers, Fla. Another Ryjik pupil, 26-year-old Diane Ferguson, won an individual silver after finishing 13th last year.
\ Jack of all trades
Or Ryjik might talk about starting from nothing. He has gone from a non-English-speaking 22-year-old visiting relatives in Pittsburgh who didn't like him because he wasn't Jewish and they were, to selling jewelry out of a briefcase on Pittsburgh sidewalks, to training for management at a Showbiz Pizza restaurant, to sodding grass for Chemlawn to being a full-time fencing coach.
There's a story behind each, usually accompanied by a jab from Ryjik's wit, much sharper than the tipped foil of a fencer.
Selling jewelry, he said, helped him learn to speak English because he heard it all day. " `How much is this?' " they would ask. "Yes, yes," Ryjik would answer. "What country does this come from?" "Five dollars, five dollars."
"Three years ago, I didn't know [English], and now I have a hard time finding Russian words," he said. "Maybe something's wrong with my head."
Showbiz Pizza, where he was trained to fix video games, was the "best time in my life [in America]. All these games, they're breaking all the time. And great free pizza." He quit when his wife got a job in the Washington, D.C., area.
Working for Chemlawn at times brought him to tears, he said. Seeding lawns was almost as bad as the Soviet Army.
He quit Chemlawn when he got enough students to make a living teaching fencing. Ryjik gives credit to Tom Jobson, another D.C.-area fencing instructor, who steered some of his students to the newcomer.
Ryjik and his wife, Anna, an apartment-complex manager in Arlington, make enough to afford their $1,000-a-month townhouse. And a baby is on the way.
Speaking of his wife, Ryjik could do so tonight. Anna worked for a Pittsburgh agency that helped foreigners get around; that's how they met in April 1990. Two months later, Ryjik was to return to the Soviet Union. He asked Anna to marry him.
"I really didn't think we should get married," she said.
They were married in June in a civil service, during which Anna poked Alex with her elbow to cue him to say, "I do."
"Whatever it means," he said.
Their wedding breakfast - the ceremony was at 8 a.m. - was at Denny's, where they feasted on . . .
"Does it matter at Denny's?" Ryjik said.
"Here's an American woman, not ugly at all, wanted to marry this guy with no culture, no money, no English, no any reasonably possibility to find a job, no finishing education," Ryjik said. "You really have to give her credit. Now, I say, I can't believe how styoopid you are. She really doesn't know what she's ending up with."
Pause.
"She made a good choice."
Anna agrees.
"The most risky thing I ever did in my life was marrying him," she said. "But it seems to be working out really well."
\ `I'm a person here'
Those are mostly the good subjects. Ryjik could also talk for hours - he has only about five minutes tonight - about life in the former Soviet Union, especially in the Army.
His unit was banished to an Arctic Ocean outpost for the deeds of one drunken soldier, Ryjik said. There, he said, the cold and bleakness prompted suicide attempts and other strange acts. Once, he said, a soldier hit himself in the head with a rock to be sent to the hospital to escape the daily routine.
He served most of his Army tour in Leningrad and, because he was an athlete, was allowed home occasionally. He was scarred by Soviet society, he said, and said he would lie or steal like other people but was wily enough not to get caught.
He is asked how his struggle to "change completely" is faring.
"It will never be done because I will still be Russian," he said. "That will never go away, and I will always have a problem with this. But I'm changing my attitude very much, my view of everything, my view of the world. Get inside. Be nice to people. I wasn't nice to people before. You're like dogs to each other in Russia. You're not a person in Russia, not an individual, no way. Here, you're a person. I'm a person here."
And, loving it. At $15 per hour for a private lesson and $10 per person in a group, Ryjik easily can make $100 per day. Some in Virginia fencing sniff at the dollar sign on Ryjik's services.
"This is America, yes? You have to make money," he said. "This always makes smile on everybody's face when I say this, but this is America. This is capitalism, what I love."
\ The gift of teaching
There is love elsewhere in this story, too.
On Ryjik's teaching rounds is the Nysmith School for the Gifted in Herndon, which is running a summer camp open to the public that includes fencing classes.
Ken Nysmith, whose mother founded the school in 1983, said Ryjik's classes have grown from 37 students during the school year to 60 in five sessions during the summer. The school will keep Ryjik around, Nysmith said.
On Monday, eight children ages 4 to 11 greet Ryjik like he's their age, only bigger. They hang on him, soft-punch him, chide him - but they listen, too. They like him, they say, because he's funny, nice and "macho."
He snaps at the kids - "I don't seeing this again, sitting on the floor!" - but they say they know it's not personal. He delights in them. "Heart feelings," he calls it, but it's never hidden.
"Alex is 25 years old," Harris said. "When he puts on the mask he's at least 50. When he takes the mask off, he's somewhere between 5 and 15."
Ryjik keeps things loose with improvisations, like the drill in which his young fencers had to run an obstacle course around two chairs, then sit on a third - something he made up as he went.
"That's the way I am," he says. "Whenever I see something I like, I do. I feel like I have to say something, I say it. I don't hide things. And I live a pretty good life."
He apparently has won the respect of his students - perhaps his most important goal. Harris, the chairwoman of the Virginia Division of the U.S. Fencing Association, said Ryjik delivers his message.
"He can say, `This is what you look like,' and it's a perfect mimicry and fairly devastating," Harris said.
Yet he is quick to praise, she said. And he excels at demanding just a smidgen more than the student thinks he or she is capable of. Physical fencing, however, is only part of it.
"I teach people to think," he said.
Unprompted, Ferguson cites Ryjik's biggest influence on her.
"He forces me to think about what I'm doing, why, how," she said. "I really do find myself thinking more during a bout."
\ Lessons of experience
Ryjik continues to divorce himself from himself. His wife can see the difference.
"He was very Russian," she said. "He thought women should be very submissive. It was kind of difficult the first year.
"He's much more relaxed with people, not as pushy as he used to be. Part of it is knowing how things work in the U.S., that for the most part people don't immediately try to cheat you."
Ryjik, now known to start friendly conversations with strangers, can remember that all too well.
"You have to understand what was Russia," he said, his voice rising. "You have biggest mafia in the world, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. That's not a party, it's a mafia. That's mafia. All these Italians, Americans, Colombians - nobody, they're nobody. Because that's a huge, organized, legalized organization of criminals. That's scary."
Ryjik said sometimes he would rather talk to students about subjects other than fencing. He certainly has enough material.
"I think I'm a knowledgeable person, because I saw two sides of the world," he said. "I saw black, and I saw white."
Keywords:
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