A Terrible Country

by Keith Gessen

  The time difference was mostly to blame, but so too, I thought, was my sudden lack of exercise. Back in New York I either played hockey or went jogging or used the university gym just about every day of the week. Now, suddenly, I did not. I tried to go jogging a few times but jogging along the street was miserable, because of the cars sitting in traffic and spewing exhaust, and jogging along the pedestrian strip on the boulevard was too annoying, since you had to either wait at a large intersection every tenth of a mile or turn back and run the same section again. As for gyms, I had looked up a few that were within walking distance and not one of them cost less than three hundred dollars a month. The solution was hockey. I had lugged all my stuff to this so-called hockey mecca, but Dima had so far failed to provide me the game he had promised, and I could learn nothing on my own online—there was no information about recreational hockey, or even the location of hockey rinks. It was like the rinks were nuclear research towns, to be kept top secret.

  The worst part of the sleep situation was that it was making me irritable. I didn’t realize just how irritable until one day I heard my grandmother shuffling past my bedroom door while I was working. I tried whenever possible to work at the Coffee Grind, but it was sometimes such a production to get out of the house (Where was I going? To a café? But we had plenty of food in the house! No, I’m going to the café to work. To work? Did I have a job at the café?) that I was trying, as an experiment, to work at home. I would certainly save on cappuccinos. But it wasn’t going well. When I tried to work in the kitchen, the room in the house with the most light, my grandmother came in and sat with me and started offering me food. I went into my room and shut the door. But she pursued me there as well. She’d knock, ask some question—What time did I want to have lunch? Did I want chicken? Did I remember her husband Lev?—and then, having received an answer, would promptly forget it and return in five minutes to ask again.

  On this afternoon that I’m remembering, about two weeks after I’d arrived, I was sitting in my room, making my way through a digital pile of student blog responses I’d pasted into a Word document at the Grind, when I heard my grandmother shuffling toward my door. I braced for her knock, but she shuffled past instead. About forty-five seconds later, she was by my door again, and again she failed to knock. This was impossible. I waited for her to come back, and when she did I rushed to the door and opened it. I found her there, in her robe, with her hand up in a small fist, preparing to knock at last.

  “WHAT IS IT?” I shouted.

  My grandmother looked at me with such pathetic fear and surprise that I immediately regretted it. “I—I don’t know,” she said. “I can’t remember. I’m so sorry.”

  “It’s OK,” I said, trying to soothe her. “I’m sorry.”

  But she walked away.

  At that moment I concluded that I needed to solve this sleep situation before it got any worse. I needed to find some exercise. If I couldn’t jog or afford a gym, then I would need to find a hockey game.

  The next day I wrote Dima to ask if he’d found out anything at all, and he apologized and said it was trickier than he’d anticipated and that the only thing he’d learned was that there was a game at Sokolniki, at the Spartak arena. He didn’t know when or who, but maybe I could just show up there and figure it out? It’s certainly what you’d do in America. So one day I finally packed all my gear into a large blue Ikea bag I found in the closet—I had, somewhat rashly and also to save on baggage fees, thrown out my ragged old hockey bag before leaving Brooklyn and simply stuffed my gear into my big red suitcase—and in the evening took the metro to Sokolniki.

  I reached the rink without any trouble: it was an actual stadium, the home rink of Spartak, and unlike most buildings in Moscow it was neither surrounded by a tall metal fence nor insanely and unreasonably guarded. There was a guard at the entrance, but he saw my hockey stuff and nodded me along. I made my way down to the ice. It was a nice, modern, professional rink, with about five thousand seats; I had never played on a professional rink before; presumably Spartak was out of town or simply wasn’t using the ice that evening, and whoever ran the rink rented it out to earn some extra money. Very cool. Only in Russia, I thought. For about five minutes, the country struck me as a vast informal arrangement, outside the reach of modernity and regimentation, an ever-evolving experiment. I liked the place. Like I say, this feeling lasted about five minutes.

  A pickup game was in progress. The level was mixed, with a few excellent players weaving through mostly mediocre ones. It was a little incongruous to see these middle-aged nonprofessionals on a professional ice surface and on the professional benches, in this beautiful arena, but it was definitely a game I could play in. And there weren’t too many guys—three on each bench, in fact, which is a couple too few.

  On one of the benches stood a guy in street clothes, like he was a coach. He probably wasn’t a coach—I had noticed that there were always guys like this hanging around in Russia, without any apparent purpose, just because—but I figured he’d know what was up.

  As I walked toward him I realized that since I’d arrived I had hardly interacted with anyone who wasn’t my grandmother, and I wasn’t sure in this situation whether to use the familiar ty or the polite vy. Back in Boston my parents had said vy to just about everyone except their close friends, but the culture had moved on, and my sense was more people now said ty. But I wasn’t sure. Vy was safer, and I went with vy. “Excuse me,” I said, using the polite form. “Can I play with you guys?”

  The pseudocoach thus politely addressed looked at me in a neutral fashion and said, “You’ll have to ask Zhora,” then turned back to the game.

  “Excuse me,” I was forced to say again, again very politely. “Where is Zhora?”

  Zhora was on the other bench. I went over. The guy closest to me on the bench was older than I was, past forty, but in good shape and with a scar on his cheek. I asked him (vy) if he could point out Zhora. He could. Zhora was on the ice, a big right-handed forward who could barely keep himself on his skates. Unlike most guys who can’t skate, however, he was fed a constant diet of passes from his teammates and given plenty of room by his opponents. I intuited from this that Zhora paid for the ice.

  When he came to the bench at the end of his shift I saw that he was about my age, with smooth, almost babylike skin and a tan. All his equipment was brand-new and he held somewhat awkwardly a very expensive stick.

  “Zhora, hello, my name is Andrei,” I said quickly. Increasingly uncertain of my vy, I added, “I just moved to Moscow and am looking for a hockey game. Do you have room?”

  Zhora looked at me. I was saying vy to everyone, like a foreigner. Instead of a proper CCM hockey bag, I had a big Ikea bag with my stuff falling out. And I was wearing my favorite short-sleeve, collared shirt, from some thrift store in Massachusetts, that had a picture of a gas station and the name “Hugo” on the chest. I either looked like a very committed hockey player or a total idiot.

  Zhora decided it was the latter.

  “We’re full up,” he said.

  This was patently untrue.

  “Every single time?” I said. “Maybe you’re full today, but not next time?”

  “Where’d you play?” said Zhora. He used the familiar ty, like he was my boss. I could now continue saying vy to him, in a sign of deference, or I could also switch to ty, which could be seen as aggressive. Or I could avoid expressions that required a choice.

  “Where did I play?” I asked, not quite understanding.

  “Yeah,” said Zhora. “For example, that guy played at Spartak.” He pointed to the rough-looking guy who’d helped me locate Zhora; he had jumped over the boards when Zhora came back to the bench and was now skating with the puck. Spartak was effortlessly dodging guys half his age; he was a tremendous hockey player.

  And, to be fair, the question of where one played was not unreasonable. In hockey you don’t want to
play with people who suck. They disrupt the flow of the game, for one thing, and for another, skating on a slippery surface and holding on to sticks, they can be dangerous. Zhora himself, for example, was such a player. So I didn’t exactly resent his question; it’s just that there was no way for me to answer it sensibly.

  “In Boston,” I said.

  Zhora chuckled. “Where in Boston?”

  “In school,” I said. In Russian there is no word for high school—all school, from first grade to tenth, is referred to as “school”; more important, as I did not quite understand at the time, there is no such thing as high school sports in Russia. Youth sports take place in so-called “sports schools.” They can be affiliated with one of the major professional teams (Red Army or Dynamo or Spartak), or they can be independent. They train kids from a young age, sometimes for free, encouraging those with talent and discouraging those without it. Whereas my answer to Zhora made it sound like I’d played shinny on the pond behind my elementary school.

  “School, huh?” Zhora laughed again. “No, it’s all right, we’re full up.” Then, in English: “Sorry.”

  “All right,” I said, though I was pissed. At least I hadn’t had to call him vy again. As I walked away, I watched the game a little longer. There really were three or four terrific players out there, but the rest of the guys were at my level or worse. They had not played at Spartak.

  My stuff felt heavy as I lugged it back to the metro, and to add further humiliation to the previous humiliation, I got stopped by two cops and asked for my “documents.” This had happened to me all the time when I was younger—the police usually stop non-Slavic-looking men, in case they’re illegal migrants or Chechen terrorists—but it hadn’t happened to me since I’d been in town, presumably because I had aged out of the illegal immigrant/Chechen terrorist cohort. But my bag must have looked suspicious. I showed them my passport, they started practicing their English but I answered them in Russian, and then they lost interest and rudely (ty) sent me on my way.

  What the fuck was wrong with these people? In America, at least in 2008, you didn’t have to show your documents all the time. And you could play hockey! You showed up at a rink, found out the schedule, put down ten dollars—maybe twenty if you were in New York—and played hockey. That was all. “Open hockey,” it was called, or “stick time.” Beautiful words! As long as you had a full face mask, you could play. And here? I had come to Moscow to take care of my grandmother and I couldn’t even get into a hockey game. When I went to the store to buy groceries, the cashiers were rude. The people on the subway were pushy. The baristas at the Coffee Grind were always smiling, but that was clearly because someone had instructed them in Western-style customer service, and they would lose their jobs if they cut it out.

  A few days after my failed attempt at Spartak, my grandmother and I were at her pharmacy, waiting to refill some prescriptions. Most Russian pharmacies don’t make a distinction between over-the-counter and prescription medicines and just keep everything behind the counter. This leads to lines. We were waiting in the line, then, when two huge guys in black jeans and black sweaters walked in, took a look at the line, and cut it, elbowing aside the woman who was waiting at the window. These guys were thugs, just like the old 1990s thugs, though with a difference. They were less fat and dressed a little better; I had begun noticing guys like this around the neighborhood, mostly sitting in black SUVs and coming in and out of the Grind, and I had concluded, rightly or wrongly, that they were from the FSB. So that was what had become of the post-Soviet criminal class—they weren’t all dead or in fancy suits; they were working for the state! I looked at the line: it was five women, aged forty to sixty, plus my grandmother and me.

  “Excuse me,” I called out. “What’s going on?” The men ignored me. One of them was giving directions to the pharmacist, who was taking notes, and pointing to something in the back.

  I said it louder. One of the men turned around and walked toward me.

  He said, “What’s the problem?”

  “We have a line here.”

  “Yeah?” said the giant. He was ugly, very ugly, with enormous jowls and a shaved head and small beady eyes.

  My grandmother didn’t pick up on the threat and seemed to think this was a new friend of mine. Very politely, she said, “Hello!”

  The giant gave her a look. “Hello,” he said neutrally.

  Then he looked back at me. “It’s a good line,” he said. “You should stay in it.” The ugly giant used the ty on me, and then turned around and went back to his buddy. They got whatever it was they came for and left. On the way out the giant gave me a long look, to make sure I understood him, and after a moment I looked away.

  “Andryush, who was that man?” asked my grandmother, as if she’d been waiting for an introduction.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Oh.” She sounded confused.

  It was humiliating. Minor, but humiliating. We walked home with her medicines.

  “That man was very fat,” said my grandmother finally. “I don’t like fat men. I was married two times, and there were many men in between. None of them was fat.”

  “Grandma!” I said.

  “What?”

  “It’s not nice to be mean to fat people.”

  “What can I do? I don’t like fat people.”

  I looked at my grandmother, who held on to my arm as we walked, just to steady herself a little. I wasn’t able to get her to open up about Stalinism, but I knew from my mother that she had despised the Soviet regime. It had poisoned her life, thwarted her career, and caused her daughter to emigrate to a foreign land, where, far from her loving mother, she became sick and died. When the regime collapsed, my grandmother cheered. And now? The neighborhood in which she’d lived on and off for sixty years had changed. It had become terrifyingly expensive. My brother was subletting his apartment next door for several thousand dollars a month. There were expensive coffee shops, expensive supermarkets, expensive clothing boutiques all around us. Most of the residents were new residents; the old residents had been bought off or died off or were pushed off to make room. All around us buildings were being refurbished, renewed, knocked down, and sometimes all three—several buildings on Pechatnikov were in the process of being totally rebuilt, with the exception of their nineteenth-century brick facades. You’d be walking along this quiet side street and see a facade still standing and some kind of work happening behind it. Then you looked, and it was an entire construction site back there, even the foundation was being replaced, but they’d kept the facade for some reason. And then among all these gleaming new objects and massive open-hole construction sites walked my grandmother, in her pink shirt and green pants, like a ghost haunting her own life. She was looking for some inexpensive cheese.

  She must have sensed something in my mood because now she said, “Did I ever tell you how we lost our dacha?”

  I was surprised. No, she hadn’t. I knew it was the result of some kind of financial machinations in the early nineties, but not anything besides that.

  “It was Lyova’s friends,” she said. “And, you know, RussOil. When Lyova was still a student he came up with a theory that there were oil deposits on Yamal.” This was the Yamal Peninsula, in the Arctic. “But there was never any time to explore that. Then, when the institute”—his research institute, in Dubna—“started falling apart, some of his friends asked him to start a business to see if they could find the oil.”

  Uncle Lev was a geophysicist tasked by the mighty empire with helping it find its oil. Alongside the great Jewish-Italian physicist Bruno Pontecorvo, who defected to the USSR in 1950, Uncle Lev had pioneered the use of neutron physics in well logging. This discovery radically increased the efficiency of Soviet oil exploration, helping the workers’ state become the largest oil producer in the world. It was oil that bankrolled the Soviet military buildup of the 1970s and the inv
asion of Afghanistan, and it was the collapse of oil prices in 1986 that caused the Soviet Union to start unraveling. Through it all, Uncle Lev worked on figuring out the physical structure of matter, the better to discover whether it had oil in it.

  As my grandmother now told the story, and as Dima later pieced it together for me where she had gaps in her memory, Uncle Lev and his friends started their company with a small investment from the institute in the hopes of finding oil on Yamal. They made a plan, hired equipment, and started exploring, using the best and latest methods. But of course there were delays and cost overruns. As the exploration of the site started eating through the new company’s small capital account, all the founders, Uncle Lev very much included, started raising money so they could finish the exploration. My grandmother and Uncle Lev had already lost all their savings in the various currency “reforms” that had been undertaken by the government, but they still had all their old stuff, plus an apartment in Moscow, a dacha in Sheremetevo, and an apartment in Dubna. First they sold their old clothes, books, and skis. When this was not enough, my grandmother and Uncle Lev took a loan out with their dacha as collateral. When even this was not enough, my grandmother came to Moscow intent on mortgaging the apartment. This was only prevented by Dima, who was living in the apartment at the time, with his first wife. He succeeded in convincing my grandmother that it was a bad idea. This was good, because what happened next was that the group ran out of money and was forced to seek funding from its partners, one of which was a subsidiary of RussOil. Apparently this subsidiary resented the additional request because a month after the funding came through, oil was struck, in very impressive quantities for a field of that size and in that place, and on the very next day the geologists came to their office to find the locks changed and guards with RussOil insignia on their uniforms posted at the doors. They weren’t even allowed in to retrieve their stuff. There were court battles and attempts to reach out to the press, and at the end of it, one of the geologists had been beaten up in front of his apartment building, one was run over by a car—perhaps accidentally—and Uncle Lev had had a mini-stroke, after which he could no longer use his left arm. And of course he and my grandmother lost the dacha.