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A Terrible Country

Page 10

by Keith Gessen


  I held my phone and wondered what to say. On the one hand, I hated clubs and dreaded especially the prospect of spending fifty or more dollars at this one. On the other hand, it was the weekend, and my grandmother was asleep and wouldn’t for once miss me. Also, I was curious. And lonely. Without internet at home I’d taken to downloading videos of naked people at the Coffee Grind for later private viewing, but they must recently have installed some kind of megabyte counter, because the last few times I’d tried to download porn while I was in there, it hadn’t worked.

  I looked at the television. The young men of LSU were running the option in silence. The announcer sounded tired. This was no way to live. I put on a dress shirt and a jacket and presented myself across the hall. “He’ll be OK, don’t you think?” Howard said when I came in.

  “I think so,” Roberto said, evaluating me. “Teatr’s face control is pretty relaxed.”

  So we had a few shots of vodka and some beers and headed to the club in a cab. Crammed in the back with an excited Howard and a reluctant Michael, all of us in sport coats, I felt drunk and a little excited. I was finally getting out of the house.

  Teatr was pulsating with dance music; we heard it as soon as we pulled up. As Roberto predicted, the two goons at the door merely patted me down for weapons and then let me in. Once inside, we were greeted by a throng of young people writhing on a dance floor that ran down at a slight angle to a stage; it was an old theater, and they had simply torn out all the seats. They’d kept the stage, though, and the DJ with his tool kit was up there playing music very loud.

  Immediately I regretted coming. This was hell. The other guys melted away, leaving me alone. I did not know how to dance, nor did it seem like anyone would have been willing to dance with me if I did. Everyone in the club was twenty years old; there were some men in there a little closer to my age, fat and bald and sweating in their suits, but they were surrounded by young women—you could almost see the dollars flying out of these guys’ pockets. I tried to dance for a while, but after joining a few dancing groups and watching those groups sort of gradually turn away from me in a coordinated movement, I slunk off in the direction of the bar, where I bought an expensive beer, which I tried to drink very slowly and purposefully, as if I had something to do.

  This is where Howard found me. He was with a tall, thin, blue-eyed girl with high cheekbones and perfect hair. I was shocked. “There you are,” said Howard, as if he’d been looking for me. “Natasha,” he said, “this is my landlord, Andrew.”

  “Landlord?” said Natasha, in English.

  “More like a representative of the landlord,” I said, in Russian.

  “You’re Russian?” she said.

  “Yes, basically.”

  “Well, and a landlord. That’s very impressive.”

  Things seemed to have turned around for me. I had seen girls like this on the street and occasionally at the Coffee Grind, but I had never actually spoken to one. It was just like speaking to a regular person, but one who was more beautiful.

  “Natasha wants to get out of here and go party somewhere else,” Howard said to me. “Want to come?” Did I! But I hesitated, not knowing whether Howard would rather be alone, and whether he was a paying customer of Natasha’s. But he seemed to want me to come along, and Natasha said, “Landlord. Come with us.”

  I don’t think she knew what was going to happen—at least, I hope she didn’t. I think she really thought we were going to continue the party somewhere else. But Howard’s bad luck was about to rub off on me. We made our way through the dancing throng and back out into the crisp autumn air. It was great to be outside, and with a beautiful girl. I was beginning to think that finally I’d made a correct decision.

  As we stood outside and Howard smoked a cigarette, Natasha was busy with her phone, occasionally muttering something in annoyance. “What is it?” Howard asked.

  “My boyfriend is an asshole,” she said.

  This was the first I’d heard of a boyfriend, but Howard took it in stride. Who didn’t have a boyfriend, after all? And a girl like Natasha probably had lots of beautiful friends. “He says he’s picking me up and we’re going home,” Natasha continued. “But I bet I can talk him into coming out with us.”

  The club was on the pedestrian strip of the boulevard, about a mile from our place; to meet Natasha’s boyfriend we had stepped over the short fence and into the street. We stood there awhile; it was around two o’clock on a Saturday night, now Sunday morning, and the street was alive with activity. This city was fun. We could feel the club pulsating from where we stood; occasionally people came out for a cigarette, or to get in a cab; there was an informal line of unofficial taxis waiting out front. The old pastel-colored nineteenth-century buildings along Clean Ponds Boulevard, converted to luxury clothing shops, gleamed yellow and pink in the moonlight. There was a Benetton, and a restaurant called Avocado that looked like it was still open. Natasha kept tapping at her phone, in an increasingly foul mood. I remember thinking, though, how ordinary this scene was—some people out partying, waiting for our ride, hoping to keep the night going—and, really, how much fun.

  Everything after that happened pretty fast. A black Mercedes SUV—the ubiquitous black Gelenvagen, which resembles a hearse, rare in the U.S. but very popular in Moscow—pulled up, and a tall, blond young man emerged from the front passenger seat. This would be the boyfriend. We all turned and looked at him, Howard and I putting on friendly, nonthreatening faces. I figured that as the native Russian speaker I should be the one to introduce us, so I stepped forward and started to say something along the lines of “I’m Andrei and this is my friend Howard” when I noticed that the boyfriend had raised his hand, as if telling me to stop speaking, that in his hand he had something black that I could swear was a gun, and that the hand with this possible gun was flying at my face.

  The gun hit my face before I had a chance to process the sequence of events; my knees buckled and I fell to the ground. “Hey!” Howard yelled. Then came the pain. It was a throbbing in my left cheekbone and a kind of spinning in my head. I was preparing to get hit again and I even put my arm up to block it, but when I looked up the Gelenvagen and Natasha were gone. The boyfriend who’d hit me hadn’t even said a word. I remained sitting awkwardly on the ground. I felt like I was very close to crying; the whole thing was so humiliating, this whole country was so awful, why was I even here?

  “Jesus, fuck, I’m sorry,” said Howard. He was crouching down next to me, looking very upset. It hurt to speak so I didn’t say anything, but it wasn’t Howard’s fault. “That car had government plates,” he said. “That cunt was probably the son of a Duma deputy. Jesus!” He hailed a car to take us home.

  It was a five-minute ride but it felt like forever. Howard sat up front with the driver. I held my cheek with my hand, hoping thereby to keep it from falling off my face. I wondered if it was broken.

  “They fucked your friend up, huh?” the cabdriver said to Howard.

  Howard nodded. “Pistolet,” he said, meaning “gun.”

  “He hit him with a gun?” said the driver. He seemed genuinely concerned. “You foreigners,” he said, “you need to be careful. Nash chelovek inogda voz’met i po yebal’niku dast, prosto tak.” “Our person”—that is, a Russian—“is liable to just up and hit you in the fucker”—that is, the face—“for no reason.” He shook his head.

  We stopped at the traffic light at the Clean Ponds metro, next to the big post office, not far from the statue of Griboedov where my grandmother and I had seen that protest. I kept taking my hand off my cheek to see if it was bleeding. It was, but only a tiny bit. Was that bad? I wondered. Would it have been better if it was bleeding profusely?

  The driver seemed to feel bad about the whole thing, on behalf of all Russians, and reached his hand into his jacket pocket. I thought for a second that it was going to be another gun, but it was a flask. He handed it b
ack to me.

  “Russian medicine!” the driver said to me in English and laughed.

  “Thank you,” I said in Russian. I took a drink from the flask—it was vodka.

  “What, you’re Russian?” said the driver.

  “Sort of, yes,” I said.

  The driver now shook his head in disgust, as if, as a Russian, I should have known better. “But I’m not Russian,” I wanted to say to him. “I’m American. I’m from a place where shit like this doesn’t happen. I am going to leave here and you will never see me again.” I found even thinking this a humiliating experience. But I meant it. I had made up my mind to leave. I was a shitty caretaker of my grandmother and neither was I having the time of my life. I would write to Dima finally to ask when he was coming back, because as soon as he came back, I was gone. This was a terrible country, and I was not cut out for it.

  The next morning I woke up with a very badly swollen but by all appearances not broken cheekbone. The pain was bad but worse than that was my grandmother’s shock at seeing me. I hadn’t thought to think of an excuse, but I did so now. The other day I had seen some Central Asian construction workers playing soccer in a dirt lot off Pechatnikov, and I now told my grandmother I’d been hit with a soccer ball. “It looks terrible,” she commented.

  It really did look terrible, and continued to look terrible for two weeks. But the worst part might have taken place that afternoon. I decided to stay home from the Coffee Grind and ice my face as much as possible; in the middle of the afternoon my grandmother and I had some tea and listened to Echo of Moscow, when who should we hear being interviewed by Elena but my brother.

  The week before, some protesters from a group called September had infiltrated a construction site on the new Moscow–Petersburg highway. I knew about this highway because Dima had bid to build gas stations on it and lost. The protesters draped signs over the bulldozers declaring that forests were for the people, not the oligarchs—the highway was going to be built through a large forest north of Moscow, destroying a sizable portion of it in the process—and tried to prevent construction crews from operating their machinery, including by pouring sugar into the gas tank of one of the bulldozers, apparently destroying its engine. In response they were roughed up by soccer hooligans hired by the construction company, and in the next day’s papers appeared photos of these nice young protesters, both men and women, getting attacked by thugs wearing MMA gloves. The construction company turned out to be part owned by a RussOil executive who was also a Duma deputy from the United Russia Party. There was enough outrage about it that the Duma deputy had to make a public statement. His statement was that this regrettable incident was the fault of “certain businessmen living abroad” who had been disappointed by the “operations of the free market” and were now trying to destabilize the situation. “We are a country of laws and respect for property,” he said. “When property is ruined at the behest of some foreign businessman, that’s something law enforcement needs to look into.” It seemed, I thought, like a potential reference to my brother, but at the time this struck me as so far-fetched that I put the thought away.

  Now here was Dima on the radio, discussing this very thing with Elena. She was asking him about the deputy’s remarks, and whether he took them to be addressed to him.

  “It’s Dima!” I cried.

  “Oh?” said my grandmother, not immediately understanding. And then, “It’s Dima!”

  “Do I think he was referring to me?” Dima was saying. “I have no idea. I can’t read the sick minds of the representatives of this sick regime. But I also think deflecting blame is a perfect sign of this sickness. So is lying. I can’t tell if they’re lying or they believe it, and I don’t care.”

  “That’s true,” said my grandmother, but I was taken aback. First, by the thought that the official’s accusations might be true, and that Dima had organized some kind of rebel army. And second, by the way he spoke: this did not sound like a person who was planning to come back to Moscow anytime soon.

  That evening Howard texted me to see how I was doing, and I asked if I could come over and check my email on his computer. From there I wrote Dima, said I’d heard him on the radio, and demanded to know what his plans were about coming back. I did not mention that I’d been pistol-whipped in front of Teatr, since he’d probably just call me an idiot for going there in the first place. In any case he wrote back right away to say he’d be coming to town at the end of October—we could talk about it then. This was an entire month away but I figured I could handle it. The swelling in my face would go down and then when Dima came I could tell him that I wanted to leave.

  I wrote to the rock drummer who was subletting my room that I would probably be taking it back in a month or two, and that he should start thinking about his next move.

  7.

  WE GO TO THE BANK

  THEN I WAITED: I waited for the swelling in my face to go down and for the days to pass until Dima came back and I was released. I was too embarrassed to show up at the Coffee Grind looking like I did, so I did my classwork at the post office on Clean Ponds; it turned out they had a bunch of old computers upstairs in a stuffy windowless room and you could pay by the minute for online access. I didn’t spend a minute longer in there than was absolutely necessary, and as a result I was around the apartment more often. My grandmother kept remarking how nice it was to have me there. Sometimes I was pleased that she was pleased with me; other times I felt resentful that it required a violent and unintentional grounding for this to happen.

  In late September, the tsunami of the financial crisis finally reached our little island of stability. There wasn’t a lot of warning. It was all “island of stability, island of stability,” and then one day the ruble plunged 10 percent against the dollar and the euro. Within a week, just about every item in the groceries in our neighborhood went up 10 percent in price.

  Soon everyone was talking about the krizis: the liberals on Echo of Moscow, the propagandists on the television news, and then, all of a sudden, my grandmother. I was still staying home and waiting for my face to heal when she walked into my room and said, “Andrei, I have a question.”

  She handed me a little booklet, just barely wider and taller than a credit card. It was from her bank, the state savings bank, and listed all her transactions from the last few years. At the beginning of the book they were recorded by hand, then at a certain point they started to be recorded by a little dot matrix printer—the bank clerks must have shoved the little book into the printer somehow.

  My grandmother handed it to me now and said, “Andryush, how much money do I have?”

  I studied the little document and determined that she had twelve thousand somethings—if it was dollars, it was a lot, but if it was rubles, it was not. Eventually I found the small print: it was rubles.

  “You have twelve thousand,” I said.

  “Dollars?”

  “No. Rubles.”

  She looked crestfallen.

  Then, “How much is that?” She meant in dollars.

  “Five hundred,” I said.

  “Five hundred dollars?” Now she sounded impressed.

  “Yes.”

  “OK.”

  She took her bankbook and left. The financial consultation was over. Then she returned.

  “Andryush. Is my money in rubles or dollars?”

  “Rubles.”

  “Should I change it to dollars?”

  Ah. The radio had frightened her with talk of the ruble’s collapse. But in fact it was too late. The ruble had already lost a tenth of its value. When I said she had five hundred dollars, I was rounding up. It used to be five hundred dollars. Now it was four-fifty. But the ruble could bounce back, for one thing, and also, this just wasn’t very much money. The hassle of going to the bank and getting this done far outweighed the potential losses from a further devaluation. So it seemed to me. For a
day or two my grandmother relented, then we had the same scene all over again, and then after she concluded it was no use asking me, she started sitting in the kitchen doing little calculations on a sheet of paper. I looked at them once, but as far as I could tell they were just numbers being multiplied at random.

  A few days later, on a Friday morning, with my face more or less back to normal, I made my triumphant return to the Coffee Grind. I was voraciously catching up on American views of the election, now just a few weeks away—the Russians hated McCain for his hawkishness and seemed optimistic that Obama would be a more reasonable American—when I got a Gchat from Dima.

  “Hey, have you deposited the rent yet? It hasn’t shown up in my account.”

  “No. Sorry. It’s been busy.”

  “Can you do it today, please? The ruble is going to collapse over the weekend.”

  Dima had wisely set the rent in dollars to isolate it from fluctuations in the exchange rate, but there was a hitch: Howard and the guys paid in rubles at the going rate on the first of the month, and in between their payment and my deposit lay danger. If the ruble were to collapse before I could get to the bank, Dima would lose money. Nine days had passed already since the first of the month. And Dima didn’t like losing money.

  I said, “How do you know about the ruble?”

  “Because I know!”

  “I read that the Central Bank was defending the currency with all its might.”

  “Listen, could you please just deposit the rent? By Monday morning the ruble is fucked.”

  “OK, OK.”

  “Thanks!”

  But I was annoyed. If it was so important for Dima that his rent get deposited in a timely fashion, he should have set it up so that I didn’t have to drag our grandmother halfway across town to the HSBC. Furthermore, as I did not feel like explaining to Dima, over the past week with my swollen face it hadn’t seemed like a good time to go to the bank to perform a potentially illegal transaction.

 

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