A Terrible Country

by Keith Gessen

  Still, I had no idea how to talk to these women, and they didn’t seem interested in helping me figure it out. Embedded in the university for most of my life, I didn’t know how to strike out on my own, with no context, no institution through which to meet other people. I tried, a few times, to start conversations in line at the Coffee Grind, to no avail.

  It was while feeling these feelings at the Grind one day that a thought occurred to me: Russian online dating. I entered the words into Google, and after some missteps I found myself on a Russian dating site. It was filled with beautiful girls. Or at least photos of them. Huh. I dug up an old photo of myself from my computer, slapped together a profile, and wrote some notes to girls who seemed like they were educated. Before the week was out I had a date with a cute blond twenty-five-year-old named Sonya. “I’m going to be in your neighborhood tomorrow night,” she wrote me. “Let’s meet up.”

  Wow, I thought. The modern world! And I continued thinking it as I met Sonya at an incredibly expensive bar called Sad (pronounced Saad) around the corner from the Tsvetnoi Boulevard metro station. Sonya was pretty, just about exactly as she had appeared in her profile photo, and smart. She was studying fashion at Moscow State and wanted to become a hat designer. She had come to Moscow from the southern city of Rostov, which was totally crime-ridden and dangerous, she said. Her best friend from high school had been raped and killed a week after their graduation. Moscow was no picnic either—she had to scrimp and save each month to make the rent—but compared to Rostov she found it a great relief. For my part I told her a few select things about my life in New York and how I’d come to Moscow to take care of my grandmother and find an interesting topic for my next academic article. She seemed sort of impressed, or at least not entirely bored.

  We had two drinks each, for a ruinous total of fifty dollars, but it didn’t matter, because Sonya seemed to like me. To my great relief she did not order food, and after about an hour, she asked if I wanted to go. I wasn’t quite sure what this meant but I said yes. We walked out into a beautiful night and toward the subway, me wondering once again whether I should make some kind of move. But before I could think about it too much, just as we rounded the corner onto the boulevard, she curled into my arms and kissed me.

  I was made a little dizzy by it. My first Russian kiss! It was like an American kiss but better, more intense, and it was in Russia. It turned out that all I had to do was go online and fill out a form.

  Then Sonya broke off our kiss and put her hand on my chest. “Andrei,” she said, “listen, I’d love to take you home with me. But there’s a cleaning fee.”

  “A cleaning fee?”

  “Well, yes, if we go to my place we’ll definitely make a mess.” She sort of cuddled into my arms again.

  It finally dawned on me what this was. At some level I didn’t care. I said, “How much?”

  “Three thousand,” she said.

  “Dollars?”

  “No, of course not,” she laughed. “We’re in Russia, after all. Rubles.”

  A little over a hundred dollars. I had brought exactly that amount with me, as a kind of upper limit on the night’s spending, and had already spent half of it on drinks.

  “Can we make it fifteen hundred?”

  “Sorry,” she said, “those are the rules. Maybe we can go to a cash machine?”

  I was horny, but this was too much. I shook my head no.

  “All right,” she said sweetly and stepped away from me. “Call me if you change your mind.” Then she turned around and walked into the subway.

  I walked home to my grandmother’s out fifty dollars. The construction sites all around me, as well as the buildings that had already gone up, had never seemed so ugly. Noisy teenagers were drinking beer and yelling on the pedestrian strip along the boulevard. As I turned onto Pechatnikov and started walking up, I passed another fancy restaurant. Wealthy men and their pretty young—I now assumed—escorts sat inside having dinner. This place sucked. And it sucked in a completely different way from the one I’d been led to expect. What happened to the scary dictatorship? What happened to the bloodthirsty regime? I had thought I was going to be arrested, but no one was going to arrest me. No one gave a shit about me. I was too poor for that. I was now getting $493.53 direct-deposited into my account by the university every two weeks for my PMOOC classes, a not totally risible salary by Russian standards, but I still had exactly as much in the bank as when I arrived—a little under a thousand dollars. And my paycheck was going to become more like $375 every two weeks come January. Anything besides rent and food and a daily cappuccino at the Coffee Grind would remain beyond my reach. This wasn’t like getting taken to the Lubyanka in the middle of the night, but as a form of social control, money worked. If people couldn’t afford to do anything but barely survive, they probably wouldn’t form a political organization and seize power. You didn’t actually need to pack them off to the Gulag. What a fucking scam. The world, I mean. The world was a fucking scam.

  6.

  I GO CLUBBING

  SO THIS WAS my life—a series of errands for Dima punctuated by a series of rejections by Russians and a slate of activities with a roommate—my grandmother—who only remembered the ones she didn’t like. My trip to Russia was not going as planned. On top of everything else I had had this notion that coming here would raise my stock back home. I wasn’t just some bookworm who sat in New York and contemplated Russia; I was in Russia itself! But that didn’t seem to have been the effect; in fact an opposite effect could be observed. One day while sitting in the Grind and considering my situation I received an email. “Dear Andrew Kaplan,” it began:

  My name is Richard Sutherland. As you probably know I teach cultural studies at Princeton. I’m coming to Moscow soon to talk with some culture-makers about their concepts of “modernity.” Our mutual friend Sasha Fishman said you’re there now and would be willing to help. I don’t of course speak any Russian but I’ve got some research funds for the trip (Princeton is really being quite good about it) and can pay you for your time—how does $8/hour sound? I arrive October 3 on the Delta flight from New York; if you’re able to pick me up some seltzer water, I am always very thirsty after a long flight!

  Thanks in advance,

  Richard

  I stared at this email amid the bustle of the Coffee Grind, across the way from the KGB. My first impulse was to delete it, but then I chickened out and undeleted it. I was flabbergasted—I should not have been, but I was. Would someone write to anyone they had the slightest shred of respect for and suggest they pick them up at the airport with some seltzer water? I didn’t know. But I suspected not. Worse still, this person had funding from Princeton to research a topic that was basically my topic, even though he did not know the first thing about it.

  But if this was an insult—and it was—the insult really emanated from Fishman. Sasha fucking Fishman! I was so mad that without thinking too long about it, I pressed “forward” on the undeleted email and put in his address.

  Dear Sasha,

  I realize I’m not a great academic star like you, but this is a bit much. Next time you know someone who needs a servant in Moscow, please do it yourself.

  Andrei

  I sent it off immediately and immediately regretted it. Not because I was wrong but because it would allow Fishman to say something condescending. I had to wait a day for it, but sure enough it came. He wrote using my American name:

  Andrew,

  I’m sorry you feel that way. I’m sure you have far more important things to do than take around one of my colleagues.

  All best,

  Alex Fishman

  Visiting Professor of Slavic Literature, etc.

  All right, Alex, I thought. We’ll see.

  But what would we see? I didn’t know. If there was some way to shame and humiliate Alex Fishman, I had yet to find it. He seemed in certain ways beyond
shame and beyond humiliation. He had once written an exuberant five-thousand-word blog post about the wonderful academic achievements of the chair of the Princeton Slavic department—at the same time as he was applying for a job there. How do you shame a person like that?

  So had I made a mistake? Not just in coming to Russia, though that too. Had I totally mislived my life? My parents had taken a great risk and undergone a great trial to bring me to a country where I could do, basically, anything I wanted. And what had I done? My friends from college and high school were now doctors, lawyers, bankers. Some of them were in Hollywood; their visions were being beamed daily to millions of people, and on top of that they were rich. They lived in nice houses in Los Angeles and gave birth to multiple children. Whereas I had chosen to read books. What a joke! I liked reading books, and I had thought that reading them would help me understand the world. But I did not understand the world. I knew nothing of the world. And to be a grown man—as I was now, no denying it—and still to be reading books? It was pathetic. And within this pathetic world, Sasha Fishman at least had a job. He didn’t have to teach four online classes just to keep the lights on. No one would ever think to hire him at minimum wage to drive them around Moscow.

  The worst part of the whole Richard Sutherland business was, I could have used the money. I would have had to neglect my grandmother but, after a few days of fetching Sutherland some seltzers, I could have called Sonya back and paid her cleaning fee. After the exchange with Fishman, though, I couldn’t go back. I wrote to Sutherland and politely begged off.

  * * *

  • • •

  My grandmother was disappointed in me. She had an insatiable appetite for company, but all her friends, as she repeatedly said, were dead or gone, and there were only so many times in a day she could call Emma Abramovna and drop hints about her dacha. Then there was me. I could be talked to. But I had my own issues. Once my class had made it through The Cossacks, we moved on to Fathers and Sons and then straight into War and Peace. The students became infected by Tolstoy’s amateur historicizing. They started coming up with all sorts of theories. Some had studied Hegel in college, and quite recently; others hadn’t been in an educational setting for forty years. One of my older students had a historical theory about Muslims that may or may not have been in violation of the university policy on hate speech; I had to delete his comments and then talk to him about them, after which I re-posted them with a short introduction saying why I was doing so. And this was just one section. I hadn’t made any rules about when the students could or couldn’t post, so they posted whenever they felt like it and I had to read it all to make sure it wasn’t too unhinged or too racist or blatantly false. In short, this was taking up more and more of my time, and meanwhile I wasn’t getting any closer to finding myself a job for next year. And because of this, I had less patience for my discussions with my half-deaf grandmother than, in retrospect, I wish I’d had.

  The saving grace was that I thought she wouldn’t notice. She heard so little and forgot so much. We’d go to the park or to Emma Abramovna’s and the next day she’d give no indication that she remembered. She couldn’t remember what we were discussing five minutes ago. Why would she remember if I ran off to the Grind after lunch without sticking around to chat?

  Occasionally Howard from next door would come by to eat sushki and talk about his reporting—once he learned I had a PhD in Russian literature, he started asking me for literary references with which to sprinkle his Moscow Times articles. But pretty quickly the conversations would devolve into tales of Howard’s sex adventures. The first time I saw him after his trip to Rasputin, he told me he had been roofied by someone at the club and bundled into a cab by Roberto (who thought he was just very drunk); next thing he knew he was waking up on the ground on the outskirts of the city without his wallet. His cabdriver had robbed him. He tried calling his roommates, but was still so messed up that he was unable to make them understand what he was saying. “I thought I was going to die out there,” he said. Finally he managed to hail a car and somehow explain where we lived, but the driver did not trust him to go upstairs and get money, and Howard ended up paying for the ride by giving the driver his phone. “That was very resourceful of you,” I said.

  “Thanks,” said Howard. “But it was a three-hundred-dollar phone.” Nonetheless, he was uncowed. He had gone to Rasputin again, in fact; he had also started using a website that allowed you to order prostitutes after viewing their profiles and reading customer reviews of their performance.

  “Are you serious?” I cried. I was shocked and amazed.

  “Yeah,” said Howard. “Want to see?”

  “No!” I said. “Or, I don’t know. Maybe later.”

  When he left I saw that my grandmother was standing in the doorway to her room, watching us. For a second I feared she had overheard Howard’s description of the hooker website. But we had been speaking in English, and anyway my grandmother could hardly have heard us from over there. She was upset, it turned out, about something else.

  “You never talk to me like that,” she said.

  “Like what?”

  “With so much animation. So much interest.”

  “Sure I do,” I said.

  “No,” she said. “You don’t.”

  I was at a loss. I mean, this was a very interesting website Howard was describing. But of course my grandmother was right. And instead of apologizing I denied it. “We talk all the time!” I said. “We’re always talking! Even right now we’re talking! We can talk some more. What do you want to talk about?”

  My grandmother pursed her lips. She knew I was being unfair but she was willing to give me a chance. “OK,” she said. “Tell me about the situation. What’s the situation in the country?”

  For some reason this question set me off. “How should I know?” I said. “I sit here all day trying to answer your questions. I have no idea what the situation is!”

  I was looming over her as I said this.

  “You don’t need to yell,” said my little grandmother as she stepped back into her room and with trembling hands closed the door behind her. I felt awful.

  Later I apologized, and she forgave me, but this sort of thing kept happening in different variations: her criticizing my shitty caretaking, me becoming defensive and unhappy and an even shittier caretaker than I had been.

  * * *

  • • •

  What was the situation in the country? It was true I didn’t know. But it wasn’t true that I had no idea.

  Everyone in Moscow seemed to drive a black Audi and there were websites where you could order a prostitute after reading all her customer reviews. Outside of a few stinky Soviet-era groceries, food was expensive, rent was outrageous, and hockey games were closed to outsiders. Every time I walked into the Coffee Grind and bought the cheapest item on the menu, I was amazed at all the other customers. Where did they come from, in this traumatized and wounded country? Some of them were walking over from the KGB building across the street, but not all of them, and anyway this was the cheapest café in my grandmother’s neighborhood. These people were buying a couple of double espressos and pastries and sandwiches and being charged thirty dollars. The worst part was, they didn’t even argue! You’d have thought some of them at least would have said, “What?” None of them said it. They handed over the money. They didn’t even blink.

  So this was the Putinist bargain: you give up your freedoms, I make you rich. Not everyone was rich, but enough people were making do that the system held. And who was I to tell them they were wrong? If they liked their Putin, they could have him.

  Of course complacency was a sin. At the beginning of the Stalinist terror, Mandelshtam said contemptuously that people thought everything was fine as long as the trams still ran on their tracks. But how else are you supposed to know that things aren’t fine? In Moscow they had long ago torn up most of the tram tracks to ma
ke room for the cars. If the remaining trams stopped running, it would be a while before anyone noticed.

  * * *

  • • •

  I still sometimes had trouble sleeping. Though I had lost my favorite show about cheaters, I kept staying up late and watching TV. Thanks to nineties-era Dima we had a cable channel that showed American sports, including football. I had always loved watching football, college football in particular, with its pageantry and crowds. In college I looked forward to being woken on Saturday mornings by the sound of our marching band on its way to the stadium. And then in Moscow, there it was again. The only catch was that the sound was off—of the crowd and the announcers both—and instead you had to listen to the Russian announcer, who was still learning the game. “Now of course they’re going to punt,” he’d say on a fourth down, except sometimes they didn’t. “Actually, they’ve decided not to punt. They’re not punting.” One of the first games I watched had a safety in it, and the announcer knew what a safety was, but he was confused by an ineligible receiver downfield (understandably) and also, less forgivably, by the ground not causing a fumble. “For some reason they are not giving them the ball,” he said of the defensive team that had caused (or, rather, not caused) the fumble. For an American of course “The ground cannot cause a fumble” was as self-evident as “All men are created equal.” But the announcer wasn’t American. I wasn’t in America. That’s the lesson I kept being taught, though I didn’t seem willing to learn it.

  One weekend toward late September I was sitting in the back room, trying to experience LSU–Auburn despite the artificial hush in which it was being played, when my phone buzzed with a text message. I remember being startled to realize it was the first text message I had received since arriving in Moscow. “It’s Howard,” said the text. “We’re going to Teatr in an hour. Want to come?” Teatr was a dance club not too far from our house. I’d passed it a few times while running errands in the neighborhood. It occupied an old theater building and had a big garish fluorescent sign out front.