by Keith Gessen
“He was very philosophical about it,” my grandmother said now, as we reached our building. “He kept saying, ‘That’s capitalism. We didn’t know the rules, and we lost. It’s our own fault.’ But I always thought his friends betrayed him.
“So that’s the story,” she concluded. “Should we have some lunch?”
Lunch! Lunch. Of course we should have some lunch. But Jesus, I thought. What a fucking shithole. What a fucked-up, good-for-nothing, awful country. Just like my grandmother always said.
“Grandma,” I said, “let’s move to America. You and me. We’ll live in New York. There are lots of nice parks there.”
“I don’t like New York,” said my grandmother matter-of-factly. “I prefer Boston.”
My grandmother had never been to New York. But she had been to Boston for my mother’s funeral.
“All right,” I said. “We can live in Boston.”
“Andryush,” my grandmother said, “I’m not going anywhere. I’d be dead before we got off the plane. I’m staying right here. Next summer I’m going to Musya’s dacha, and then I can die.”
In this shithole? I thought, but didn’t say. In this particular shithole of a country? Dying is all it’s good for. Why give them the satisfaction?
But I did not bring up America again.
As for my sleeping problem, I started drinking a big Russian beer before going to bed. I bought it at the smelly little grocery at the corner of Lubyanka and the boulevard, or at another smelly little grocery on Pechatnikov, closer to our house, accessible through a little gap between the building next to ours and the church wall. This little alleyway off Pechatnikov was also where our dumpster was, and sometimes at night there was a guy eating food out of it. Was he the same guy who used to eat from that dumpster years before? If so, it spoke well of his longevity. Anyway, the beer put me to sleep faster, and kept me asleep longer, though in the morning I’d always have a bad feeling of some kind. The water used in Russian beers was not known for its purity. But imported beer cost twice as much and a minor tummyache was, in the final analysis, a small price to pay for some sleep.
5.
I TRY TO MAKE SOME FRIENDS
IN THE SECOND WEEK of September, my grandmother’s best friend, Emma Abramovna, came back to town from her dacha. We went to visit her right away.
Emma Abramovna was originally from Poland but had moved to Moscow in advance of Hitler in the late 1930s; she had met my grandmother in the forties at Moscow State, where both of them were young professors. Jewish women in an official environment that was becoming increasingly hostile to Jews, they became friends. Unlike my grandmother, though, Emma Abramovna had somehow managed to remain at the university throughout all the changes that took place in the USSR. She was a tremendously charismatic, outspoken person, with absolutely no fear of authority, and she was often, according to my grandmother, in conflict with the university administration; perhaps her very outspokenness had protected her. In any case, even after her daughter emigrated to Israel in the late eighties, she remained in Moscow. Her two sons had remained in the city, and this was a tremendous help.
Emma Abramovna lived in an old building off the huge Tverskaya thoroughfare, up the street from Patriarch Ponds, about a mile and a half from us. Though it was nearby as the crow flies or the young person walks, on the subway there was no direct route; we had to go south on the red line and then transfer and head northwest on the green one. My grandmother was a little wobbly by the time we arrived, but at least we didn’t need to climb any stairs; some years earlier, when Emma Abramovna started having trouble with her hips, her sons traded her apartment on the fourth floor for a similar apartment, in the same building, on the first. We came in, walked down a corridor, and were at her door.
We were greeted by Emma Abramovna’s caretaker, a large, round, friendly woman from Moldova named Valya. While I took a quick tour of the apartment, she helped my grandmother orient herself and get ready in the mirror. “What an old lady,” my grandmother kept saying, “what a scary old lady”—visiting Emma Abramovna brought out my grandmother’s fear that she was not attractive. And I was having simultaneously my own insecurities. The apartment was incredible. The floors were new, the walls and ceilings had fresh coats of paint, and Emma Abramovna’s sons (or someone) had installed a special stand-up shower booth, with handles all along its perimeter, to make it easier for Emma Abramovna to get in and out. It made me feel powerfully ashamed of the job Dima and I were doing on Sretenka.
“Musya,” my grandmother was saying when I joined them in the living room, also Emma Abramovna’s bedroom. Emma Abramovna half sat, half lay on the couch, a blanket across her lap, while my grandmother perched on a small chair that Valya had pulled up for her at the foot of the couch. “Musya, look at you, you are so beautiful.”
It was true. Emma Abramovna was Baba Seva’s age almost exactly, and she was not in the best of health: her hips barely functioned; she used a walker and needed a great deal of help getting in and out of chairs. And yet unlike my grandmother she glowed. She had thick curly hair, now gray, that came up from her head in a small Afro, and her olive skin color and brown eyes suited her still. It was strange to see someone from my grandmother’s generation so animated and even cheerful; my grandmother apparently found it strange as well.
“Look at your hair,” she went on describing her friend’s beauty. “It’s so thick!”
“Sevochka, cut it out,” Emma Abramovna said.
“What?”
“I said stop it!”
“It’s not my fault you’re beautiful!” my grandmother insisted.
“Andrei.” Emma Abramovna turned to me. “How are you? How long are you here?”
I told her I didn’t know, but a few months at the least.
“That’s wonderful,” said Emma Abramovna. “Seva is very happy you’re here.”
“But he’ll leave eventually,” my grandmother said sadly.
“Yes, but he’s here now!”
“That’s true,” my grandmother said, still very sadly. “That’s true.”
And on it went, over a variety of subjects as disparate as the state of contemporary film to the outcome of the Second World War. My grandmother would say something pessimistic, to be corrected by Emma Abramovna, or alternately Emma Abramovna would say something optimistic, to be contradicted by my grandmother. And then of course there was the dacha.
“Did you have a good time at Peredelkino?” asked my grandmother.
“Yes, it was lovely. Borya”—her youngest son—“made a lot of improvements over the winter. And I had visitors throughout August. I don’t know what I’d do without Peredelkino.”
Emma Abramovna always said exactly what she thought. This was an admirable trait, and yet it also meant that she didn’t pick up signals from people who were more subtle or indirect about things, like my grandmother.
“I had a dacha once,” my grandmother said now. “We always went there during the summer.”
“I know, Sevochka.” Emma Abramovna softened momentarily.
“Now I have nowhere to go,” my grandmother said.
This was clearly an opening for Emma Abramovna to suggest that my grandmother come visit her next summer, but she didn’t seem to think so and let it pass.
“You’re so lucky that you had three kids,” my grandmother continued. “They take such good care of you.”
“You could have had more kids!” Emma Abramovna lost her temper a little. “No one was stopping you!”
“Yes,” my grandmother said, in the way one does when actually deep down disagreeing. “Maybe.”
Still and all, the whole thing was about as animated and happy as I’d seen my grandmother since I’d come to Moscow. This was her one remaining friend and contemporary. And surely Emma Abramovna would eventually catch the hint about the dacha.
As soon as we were o
ut the door, my grandmother turned to me, as if she’d been waiting to do so the entire time, and said, “Poor Musya. She can’t walk anymore. Imagine that? I don’t know what I’d do if I couldn’t walk.”
For our trip home we caught a car. One of the undeniably non-terrible things about Moscow was that you could hail a random car on the street and it would give you a ride for a reasonable price. It had been one of the ways Russians adapted to the shortages of Communism—there weren’t nearly enough cabs to go around, so people just started offering each other rides. When I was little my father used to go out a few nights a week and look for fares; it was an ordinary activity for people with cars, including people with cars and advanced engineering degrees. This practice lasted well into the post-Soviet era, though one thing I had noticed since I arrived was that fewer and fewer Muscovites felt like earning three dollars for driving someone a mile down the boulevard. You had to look for beat-up old Russian-made cars; their drivers were poor enough to take you. On this occasion we got lucky, and one of the first cars my grandmother hailed was old and Russian, and stopped. On the ride home she was in a garrulous mood and quizzed the driver about his dacha. He was from Armenia, it turned out, and had a dacha outside Yerevan. It had a beautiful garden, he said, though he hadn’t been there in three years, as he was here in Moscow trying to earn some money.
“Yes,” said my grandmother. “A dacha is a very good thing.”
As we entered our apartment, she turned to me. “It’s terrible about Musya’s legs, but in another sense she is very lucky. Her kids take such good care of her. That was my mistake. I only had one kid. Don’t only have one kid. Have three kids. Then they’ll take care of you.”
I went to bed that night and thought: Didn’t my grandmother have a daughter, and didn’t that daughter have two sons, and weren’t we taking care of her now? My grandmother’s suggestion was that no, we were not. And compared to what Emma Abramovna’s sons were doing for her, it was hard to argue. I was there, yes, but also I was not there. My PMOOC classes were more arduous than I had expected: I had sixty students across the four sections, which meant hundreds of blog posts and, as the semester progressed, hundreds of emails, which meant hundreds of emails that I had to answer in a timely fashion because the PMOOC administrators swore by the student evaluations—they really had nothing else to go on—and there was nothing students took to less kindly than someone not answering their emails. Whether I wanted to or not I had to spend hours at the Coffee Grind. And, in truth, I did want to. My grandmother did not make it easy to keep her company. She was depressed; she complained. She complained about everything. Had I been doing great myself I might have been more sympathetic, but I too was a little bummed out. After my initial hope of interviewing her was disappointed, I hadn’t thought of another way forward. All the topics seemed taken; the field was crowded. I would never find something unique and my own. Perversely, this made me spend more time at the Coffee Grind looking at people’s Facebook pages. My failure as an academic was not making me a success as a grandson.
* * *
• • •
Meanwhile, back home, the American financial system collapsed. From my perch at the Coffee Grind, I watched events unfold on Facebook and the website of the New York Times.
Some of my old classmates joked about the news—“Good thing I work in an industry where no one makes any money,” Sarah wrote on Facebook—but on the Slavic jobs website things were grim. One search got canceled when the funding for the job fell through. And there were rumors of further cuts.
“We’re fucked,” my adviser told me over Gchat. “Nelson”—Phil Nelson, the outspoken president of our university—“has been treating the endowment like his own personal poker game. I bet we’re about to lose some unthinkable chunk of it. And if oil prices collapse, the campus in Qatar is in trouble.” The satellite campus in Qatar had been one of President Nelson’s signature gambles, and it had been turning a nice profit during the era of $100 barrels of oil.
“Won’t more people go back to school if the economy is bad?” I said. I’d read that somewhere.
“Sure,” said my adviser, “but they’ll go to an affordable school. They’ll go to a good school.”
“I swear to God,” he went on, “I could get fired any minute. I’m afraid to check my email!”
“Aren’t you on email right now?”
“Yes. But I’m afraid.”
This conversation freaked me out. I felt momentarily like a person who had escaped a great cataclysm, but of course I had not escaped it. My adviser did not get fired, though neither would the Slavic department survive the crisis intact; as for me I eventually received an email from the university administration that in anticipation of declining PMOOC enrollment for the next semester, the maximum number of classes per instructor per semester was now three. This was effectively a 25 percent cut in my pay.
Back in Moscow, my grandmother and I watched the evening news in the back room three or four nights a week. All the channels were controlled by the state, but they weren’t gray or boring. The newscasters were attractive and spoke clearly, with conviction; the production values were top-notch. With terrifying music and fast cuts, the news presented a world in crisis: there was trouble in Georgia, there was trouble in Iraq, there was trouble in Africa. Luckily, we in Russia had Putin. Wherever trouble reared its head, Putin was there to tame it. Putin was no longer even president—his hand-picked successor, Dmitry Medvedev, was president, and Putin was prime minister—but when push came to shove, Putin was still in charge. Everything was OK. Russians could sleep at night.
And now there was trouble in America too. The Russians really enjoyed the financial crisis, at least at first. The news showed footage of American bankers carrying boxes out of their ruined companies. Soviet propaganda had always stressed the problem of homelessness in the United States, and those images of the bankers with their boxes made you wonder—were they going to sleep in them? Meanwhile the Russian finance minister came on to explain that we had nothing to worry about: Russia was an island of stability in a sea of troubles. He did hope, however, that this experience would teach the Americans a valuable lesson.
One evening around this time my grandmother and I were out for a walk along the boulevard; we had ventured farther than usual and arrived at the small park on the other side of the Clean Ponds metro station. On this evening there was a group of people gathered at the Griboedov statue; they were surrounded by an even larger group of police. “It’s a protest,” said my grandmother. “Let’s get out of here.”
This time she was right. It was a protest. I maneuvered us across the street, at a safe distance but so that I could see what was going on. The protesters were mostly middle-aged and educated looking—glasses, shaggy hair, short-sleeve dress shirts, and some argyle sweaters. They looked like my parents. They held signs that said FRIENDSHIP WITH THE WEST and AMERICA’S CRISIS IS OUR CRISIS TOO! There were even some signs in English. These were the liberals, the Echo of Moscow listeners, the people whom Putin’s political adviser Vladislav Surkov had recently compared to a fifth column inside the country. Surrounded and significantly outnumbered by burly, stone-faced police, they seemed harmless and pathetic.
And then I noticed a group of what looked like teenagers, all in black, scrambling to the roof of the metro station. Once they got there they shot a flare into the sky. For a second I wondered if this was the direct action wing of the protest, the reinforcements. Then they unfurled a banner that read DON’T ROCK THE BOAT and started chanting it: “Don’t rock the boat! Don’t rock the boat!” These were counterprotesters, regime supporters, sent to intimidate this small protest as if the massive police presence weren’t enough. The police didn’t even pretend to try to stop them. Neither did the protesters. It was depressing.
We went home to watch the news. Our protest wasn’t on it. But Putin was. In truth you had to admire his mastery. The world saw in him a
cold-blooded killer, a ruthless dictator, the gravedigger of Russian democracy. But from the Russian perspective, well, he was our cold-blooded killer, our ruthless dictator, our gravedigger. And he was good at what he did. He could be charming when he needed to be, or menacing, or full of pathos. He loved playing against type. If you expected tough Putin you’d get sensitive Putin, but if you started expecting sensitive Putin—kablamo! Tough Putin would sock you in the jaw. During one interview my grandmother and I watched, he was asked about the criticisms the opposition was making of his administration. Instead of dismissing them outright, he said sadly, “Some of these criticisms are fair. I think we need to listen to them and take them into account and work harder. But some of the criticisms are too much. They are directed not just at my administration, but at our country. And the truth is, our country is troubled. It has still not recovered from the turbulence that took place under my predecessor. I think we all know: Mother Russia is sick. But when your mother is sick, there is only one thing you can do: you have to help her.” It was a devastating response. And all the opposition’s yelling and screaming about Putin’s crimes, his corruption, his recklessness—all true, by the way, as far as I could tell—could not penetrate it.