A Terrible Country

by Keith Gessen

  My grandmother usually went to bed after the news ended; I stayed up to watch some more. You can learn a lot about a place by watching TV. Many shows were imports: American action movies, South American soap operas, even The Simpsons. But there was also some native programming. I enjoyed the reality shows. They were mostly rip-offs of American or European concepts, but with more sex and violence. The sex in particular was impressive. Even in Russia, a place where you’d think people would be worried about surviving, staying out of jail, and not getting run over by a car—even here people wanted to fuck one another.

  * * *

  • • •

  One of my responsibilities as Dima’s replacement was to collect the rent once a month from the guys next door. They were a group of expats, but my grandmother called them “the soldiers,” for reasons that were not entirely clear—it’s possible she had misheard my brother or me when we’d mentioned “subletters” (but why in English, unless it was one of the soldiers introducing himself as a “subletter”?) or it’s possible she couldn’t understand why three unmarried men would be living together, rather than with their mothers (or grandmothers), unless they were in fact soldiers. In any case, they weren’t soldiers: they were a beautiful Italian guy named Roberto, who worked in real estate; a soft-spoken American blond from Seattle named Michael; and a chubby British journalist named Howard, who worked at the English-language expat newspaper, the Moscow Times. They were all in their midtwenties, and the first time I’d gone over there to collect the rent I found them arguing about whether to go to a particular nightclub. Actually, Roberto was arguing with Michael that it was Michael’s moral duty to go to the club, because girls liked him. Michael was arguing back that he didn’t want to go, he had a girlfriend back home, and anyway he had to be up early the next day. Meanwhile the third roommate, Howard, was watching a Premier League soccer game on Dima’s big flat-screen TV. It was a shock to go over there; the apartment was the same size as my grandmother’s and had once had the same layout, but Dima, under the direction of his second wife, Alina, had knocked down several walls to create an open space and then three small bedrooms off of it. If my grandmother’s place was a museum of Soviet furniture, Dima’s was a testament to refined Russian taste circa the turn of the millennium. It felt like I had crossed the landing and traveled forward in time fifty years.

  “I just got back together with Susan,” Michael was saying. “I don’t want to go hit on Russian girls.”

  “But they like you,” Roberto said.

  “No, they don’t. They just do it to make the rich Russian guys jealous.”

  “Michael, who cares why they do it? It is not for us to understand.”

  “Why does everyone in this town just want to sleep with hot chicks?” Michael asked. He seemed almost pained by this. “It’s like, there are other things.”

  Roberto shook his head sadly. “You do not understand life,” he said. “Life is for living. Look at Putin. Or Berlusconi. He is an old man. He has unlimited power over his country. And still he is chasing after the girls.”

  “I don’t want to be like Berlusconi!”

  “OK, OK, no Berlusconi. But Russian girls are the most beautiful in the world. Most generous. You are being unreasonable!”

  “Come on, you wanker!” cried Howard. He was looking at the television as he said this. We all turned to the game. The sequence ended with the player addressed by Howard kicking the ball over the goal. Howard deflated and turned momentarily to Roberto and Michael. “I’ll go,” he said.

  Apparently this did not meet with Roberto’s approval. “You ask too many questions,” he said to Howard. “Girls don’t want to feel like they are being interrogated.” Now to me: “He says: Where are you from? What do you do? How many siblings you have? Do you want to do a photo with me? They think he’s from FSB.”

  “I’m curious,” said Howard.

  “I’m going to Rasputin,” Roberto said menacingly. “If you cannot get in, I will still go.”

  “I’ll take that chance,” said Howard.

  “This is life.” Roberto sighed. “Those who can, don’t want to. Those who cannot . . .”

  “Are full of passionate intensity!” Howard supplied. “You’ll see,” he said. “Tonight is my night.” And he hopped off the couch and headed into his bedroom to put on some nicer clothes.

  Those were the guys across the landing. They paid their rent in rubles on the first of the month. Having received it, I then had to take it, with my grandmother, to Dima’s bank, which was several subway stops and one transfer away. I had to bring my grandmother because, due to some Russian law meant to prevent either capital flight or capital infusion, it was illegal for a foreign citizen (me) to deposit funds into the account of a Russian or dual citizen (Dima). So I had to drag her to the bank. When we did this the first time she was so tired from the subway ride that she practically collapsed in a chair the minute we walked into HSBC. I went up to the window and explained that I was depositing money into my brother’s account and that our grandmother would sign for it. I received a form and walked it over to Baba Seva. As she signed it, she asked what it was. Very loudly I said, “We are depositing the rent from Dima’s subletters into his account!” I said this loudly because it was plain for everyone to see that actually I had found some elderly lady on the street and asked her to help me deposit stolen money into an offshore account. When I mentioned the subletters, she said, “Who?”

  “The subletters! Dima’s subletters! The soldiers!”

  “Oh, the soldiers.”

  I brought the form back to the window. No one said a word. I withheld two hundred rubles from the rent so we could take a car home, but by the time we got out of the bank, the traffic was so bad that we had to take the subway again anyway. I kept the two hundred rubles.

  I wasn’t sure if, as the rent collector, it was appropriate for me to hang out with the soldiers; nor whether, as a thirty-three-year-old academic who had never been to a real nightclub, much less one with face control, it would be pathetic of me to want to do so; nor was I sure I even wanted to. It was a relief to speak English, to not have to worry about whom to address as ty and whom as vy, and to be welcomed back into the long luxurious adolescence of the contemporary Western male. This wasn’t of course what I had come for. It felt like a cop-out. But I didn’t have a lot of other options.

  I had a brief social outing in mid-September with Dima’s friends, whom I thought I could perhaps borrow as friends while I was there as I had once hoped to borrow Dima’s car. A guy named Maxim had been, apparently, the one to blame for the exercise bike clogging up my room. That is to say, Dima, when leaving, had asked him if he wanted it, and Maxim said yes and then failed all summer to pick it up. When he eventually did stop by for the bike, he said he was having a birthday party just around the corner that weekend, and I should come.

  I met him and a few others at a small French restaurant called Jean-Jacques down near the Tsvetnoi Boulevard subway station. It wasn’t terribly expensive, for Moscow, but it was definitely out of my price range. Before I could think up some excuse to leave, Maxim bought me a French beer and introduced me around; the small group of friends—Alla, Borya, Kristina, Denis, Elena, Fyodor—were all also Dima’s friends, closer to my age than to his. They seemed nice enough. Dima was a business mogul but he had always chosen his friends from the circle of art students, bohemians, and journalists. As they talked, I gathered that these Moscow friends worked in advertising and magazines and public relations. They were interested in politics—Maxim and Elena had been at the protest at Clean Ponds that my grandmother and I had run into the other day—and dispensed their opinions with that mixture of bluster, sarcasm, and despair that I’d grown used to already from Echo of Moscow. “These goblins think they’re going to weather the world financial crisis while everyone else goes under,” Maxim said. “It’s a joke.”

  “Whereas I think
the Americans,” said Fyodor, turning to me, “they’re going to right the ship pretty quickly, don’t you think?”

  He said ty. But I had no idea. I knew that back home people were withdrawing their life savings from banks and discussing which root vegetables they should buy in case supermarkets closed down for the winter. And it was the people closest to the world of finance who seemed most frightened. To Fyodor I said, “I don’t know. My friends in America are pretty freaked out.”

  “They’ll be fine,” Maxim said with authority. “America will be fine. But Russia is fucked. This country is run by idiots.”

  Soon the conversation turned to culture. There was a long and intricate discussion of the first season of Breaking Bad; asked to weigh in as an expert on all things American, I had to admit I’d never seen the show, nor been to New Mexico, nor tried crystal meth. And in general I think I was a disappointment to them. When they learned that I lived in New York they started asking me about the art galleries and restaurants they knew there, which I had never been to or even heard of. Every minute I spent with them made it clearer how much more money they had than I did.

  The one bit of common ground we found was in our anger at Russia. When I told them about my experience trying to play hockey at Sokolniki, they were properly indignant. “That’s typical Russian lack of culture,” said Alla, a marketing director. “Disgraceful.”

  “Don’t worry,” said Borya, who worked in advertising, “there are still some normal people left in this country.”

  “Do you know any hockey games?” I asked.

  “No. I prefer tennis.”

  “For hockey you really need blat,” said Kristina—an in, a connection.

  This made me angry all over again. “That’s ridiculous!” I said. “Hockey should be for everyone.”

  “To be fair,” Maxim said, “if you let just anyone play, they’d probably ruin it.”

  So these were the Russian liberals who opposed the Putin regime. It turned out they hated Russia. They sort of lived there, but they also sort of lived somewhere else. None of them watched Russian TV. I tried, as part of the general pop culture conversation, to mention my affection for the Russian reality programs, only to be told by Elena that the one I liked best—a hyperviolent version of Cheaters, about cheating husbands and (mostly) wives—was fake.

  “What do you mean fake?”

  “It’s fake. All the so-called reality shows are fake.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I’m a journalist,” she said. “I know these things.” Elena was blond, my height, stocky, with a haircut that framed her face and pretty blue eyes. She was a kind of Slavic version of Sarah, actually, and I found myself gravitating toward her. I must have looked stricken at the information about my show, because she added, “Sorry.”

  But of course it made sense. The structure of the plot was always the same, and the idea that they actually captured as much illicit footage as they claimed was risible. It was obvious to me now.

  “It’s still an interesting cultural product?” I said.

  “It’s trash. Everything on Russian TV is trash.”

  “I’ll tell you what I watch,” Maxim interrupted. He was a former magazine editor who now managed an upscale wine store. “My weekly schedule is Mad Men on Monday, House on Tuesday, Breaking Bad on Wednesday . . .” These were all a day later than the shows aired in the States. That’s how long it took before they appeared on one of the online TV sites.

  “And what about Russian TV?” I asked.

  “Never in a million years,” said Maxim. “I couldn’t watch it if I tried, to be honest. I don’t have an antenna. My TV is a screen for my computer, nothing more.”

  I wanted to leave. I wasn’t sure I liked these people; I didn’t know whether to say ty or vy to them; and, more to the point, if I stayed I’d have to buy Maxim an expensive French beer. On the other hand, Elena. She had insulted my favorite show, but I liked the way she’d done it. I checked her right hand for a wedding band (Russians wear their wedding rings on their right hands), and there was none; just in case (who knew with these people), I checked her left hand also. There too she was unmarried. We were all standing, though not at the bar, and I decided to get Maxim a beer, and one for myself so I could relax a little, and I also asked Elena if she wanted anything. “Why not?” she said, which seemed like a good sign, and asked for a glass of grenache. It cost twenty dollars, which with two nine-dollar beers put me out thirty-eight dollars, plus tip. I had to ask the bartender to repeat himself, because it sounded like a mistake. It wasn’t a mistake.

  Nonetheless, when Elena finished her drink and announced it was time to go, I asked if I could walk her (vy, I said) wherever she was going.

  “If you want,” she said, using ty. This meant that I should also switch to ty. Or not?

  Elena was parked on Pechatnikov, on the way to my grandmother’s place, and as we walked—it was a nice night, in the brief autumnal interim between summer and the bitter cold—I asked her where she worked as a journalist. “Echo of Moscow,” she said.

  “I listen to that all the time!” I said. “It’s my grandmother’s favorite station.”

  “I’m glad to hear that,” said Elena. “For me it’s just where I work.”

  “OK,” I said. Now I said lamely, “I will listen for your show, then.” (Vy again! I couldn’t help it.)

  “OK,” she said.

  Elena was clearly not into me. On the other hand, Russians are very reserved. Maybe this taciturnity bordering on outright hostility was actually her way of being into me?

  “That was a fun party,” I said.

  “It was OK.”

  “Where do you live?”

  “Zamoskvorechie,” she said. “Do you know it?”

  I didn’t. And we had arrived at her car.

  “Well, good night,” said Elena, and started to open her car door.

  “Wait,” I said. I could tell she didn’t like me, but somehow her physical resemblance to Sarah convinced me that just maybe she did.

  Elena turned toward me reluctantly, and as she did so, I leaned in to kiss her. She deftly turned her head so that I gave her cheek a kiss instead.

  “Andrei,” she said, pushing me away with her hand, not unkindly, “you seem like a nice young man. But I don’t think you’re cut out for this.”

  “For what?” I said. Did she mean kissing?

  “For this,” she said, gesturing up the street and around it. From where we stood on Pechatnikov, you could see some of the church steeples and oil and gas headquarters of downtown. “For Russia.”

  “Oh,” I said. But I didn’t understand. “In what sense?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Just a feeling I have.”

  And with that, Elena got into her car. Her driver’s seat was on the right-hand side—this usually meant the car had been bought used by an enterprising young man in Japan, taken by ferry to Vladivostok, and then driven straight across Russia to be sold in Moscow—and she spent a few moments studying the rearview mirror and trying to figure out if there were cars coming up Pechatnikov.

  Then she thought of something and rolled down her window.

  “You don’t have to say vy to everyone,” she said. “It makes you sound retarded.”

  “OK,” I said. I tried to think of a sentence in which I would address her with the familiar ty, but I couldn’t. “OK,” I said again, stupidly. “It’s a deal.”

  Elena nodded and drove off.

  * * *

  • • •

  What did she mean, I wasn’t cut out for Russia? It felt insulting, though I couldn’t quite locate the insult. Was I too much of a wimp? I hadn’t been in a fight since college (it was more like wrestling, and a draw), and though I was in pretty good physical condition for an academic, it’s true there was an air of violence on the streets h
ere that I didn’t know how to handle. Or did she mean something else? Was I too boring for Russia? Like in a spiritual sense? Was I too callow?

  As I tried to figure it out, I noticed that the evening had another effect as well. My attempt to kiss Elena, though a failure, had reminded me of the existence of women. I hadn’t realized until then how bummed I still was about Sarah; if her breaking up with me was mostly just embarrassing, the creeping realization since I’d gotten to Moscow that she was sleeping with someone else had made me sexually depressed. I wasn’t even interested anymore. And living with one’s grandmother, I had to admit, was something of an anti-erotic experience.

  But now, as I walked the streets around our house on various errands, or sat at the Coffee Grind, or occasionally turned on the TV, I realized: I wanted to fuck every woman I saw. I couldn’t tell if it was me or it was them: me because I was sexually deprived, or them because they dressed so well, took such good care of themselves. Either way, once I started thinking about it, I couldn’t stop. In the Coffee Grind, frequented not just by FSB goons but by young office workers from the adjoining neighborhood, I watched the women’s thin blouses ride up their bare backs as they leaned forward to sip their espressos. I watched them cross their legs. On the street, where they walked in high heels, I watched their ankles, their hips. Why should flesh in one place or another matter so much? It was just skin and muscle and fat. But still.

  Was it me or was it them? I could swear it was them. Russian men had been drinking and yelling and shooting at one another for so long that there weren’t that many left. There were not enough men to go around. This produced intense competition for the ones who remained. Women worked out; they dressed up; they spent hours at beauty salons getting their skin smoothed, their brows plucked, their butts massaged. What I was seeing as I looked around me with a boner stirring in my pants was a calculated response to a tragic situation of scarcity. I was wrong to enjoy it. I kept telling myself that.