by Keith Gessen
After the Gchat, though, I figured I might as well do it. I finished up some student emails and headed home.
When I got there my grandmother was drinking tea in the kitchen. She always sat with her back to the door, facing the window, and sometimes she didn’t hear me come in.
“Hello!” I called out, so as not to frighten her.
She turned around in her chair and smiled. “Coo-coo!” she said happily. Her teeth were out, which gave her a look of childlike joy when she smiled. “You’re home early. Should I heat up lunch?”
And then I remembered—my grandmother’s life savings! She hadn’t mentioned it in a few days, but if the ruble collapsed she would never forgive me. I would never forgive myself.
“Listen,” I said now. “Do you want to convert your account into dollars?”
“What?”
“Your bank account. Do you want it to be in dollars?”
“Of course!”
She might have forgotten the devaluation but she knew that she had faith in the dollar.
“OK,” I said. “Let’s go to the bank.”
My grandmother put in her teeth, got dressed in her best slacks, a sweater, her pink coat and hat, and off we went. Her bank, Sberbank, the state bank, was just around the corner, and I figured we could go there first and then deposit Dima’s rent, which I brought with me.
But the Sberbank was packed. The branch was just too small—a row of cashiers’ windows and a narrow waiting space before them, maybe five feet deep. It was impossible to form any kind of line in that space, so people stood haphazardly wherever they could. “Who’s last in line?” I asked.
A bespectacled man in his fifties said he was.
“And all these people are in front of you?” I asked.
“That’s how a line works,” he confirmed.
“Then we’re after you,” I said, to complete the transaction. There was no telling how long this would take. I could have the guy hold my place in line and walk my grandmother home, but if the line was quicker than it looked I’d have to run after her soon and drag her back here again. Probably better to just wait it out. As I contemplated the possibilities, I heard my grandmother thanking someone; a woman had offered her the lone chair.
Now a woman came through the door, looked stoically at the long line, and asked who was last.
“I am,” I said.
“I’m after you,” she said. I nodded.
“Why are there so many people?” I asked the man who had been last before me, wondering if he’d also heard about the coming devaluation.
“It’s always like this on Fridays,” he said. He thought a moment. “And other days too.”
In the end, we would wait for more than two hours. When it was finally our turn, an exhausted and irritated clerk converted my grandmother’s life savings to dollars and handed us a brand-new bankbook.
“Is that it?” my grandmother asked me as we walked away from the window.
“Yes,” I said. “You now have dollars.”
My grandmother, who was holding on to my arm, patted it. She was exhausted but pleased. It was not too late to go to Dima’s bank, but I couldn’t do it to her. She was much too tired. We went home and I spent the weekend at the Grind checking the news sites for word of the collapsing ruble. Instead, the news was still dominated by the American presidential race. Just in case, I turned off my Gchat so that my brother couldn’t yell at me. In the event, the ruble opened Monday even a little stronger than it had closed on Friday. We made the trip to HSBC first thing that morning and deposited Dima’s money. My delay had actually earned him some money, though I wasn’t going to harp on that, especially as, two weeks later, the ruble did have another bad day—Bad Tuesday—and slipped another 10 percent. But my grandmother’s life savings had ridden out the storm mostly intact.
In those first few weeks after getting hit in the face, every time I went out of the house I was skittish. I kept thinking I saw the guy who hit me, and my heart jumped: Should I run and confront him? If I did, would he hit me again? Once you realize that other people can physically harm you, with no warning or provocation, you start seeing things differently. I hated going out of the house those first weeks, though I had to get groceries and a couple of times I went for a jog so I wouldn’t get too depressed. This lasted, as I say, for a few weeks, but eventually it wore off. My heart stopped racing every time I saw a tall, blond guy on Sretenka or in the Coffee Grind. Anyway, I figured I’d be leaving soon.
Obama, I sensed, would win the election. I looked forward to returning to an enlightened, post-racial America just as soon as my brother came back.
In the meantime, in the aftermath of the ruble’s devaluation, I’d grown richer. My cappuccinos were now 20 percent off. Once or twice in the weeks after the devaluation, I even bought myself a sandwich. Live it up, Kaplan, I thought. Live it up.
8.
MY GRANDMOTHER DEMANDS SOME SLIPPERS (FROM BELARUS)
ONE OTHER THING turned my way before Dima came to visit. My grandmother announced that she needed new slippers from Belarus. That she needed new slippers was true. Like all Russian people, my grandmother took her shoes off when entering her apartment and replaced them with slippers. Since she did perpetual laps around the apartment, the slippers were getting serious mileage, and it showed. The rub was that she liked her current slippers, and believed that they were from Belarus. So it had to be Belarusian slippers again.
This was not easy. There was a shoe store on Sretenka where I had bought my own slippers—they had a black insole and an argyle pattern; they were pretty cool slippers—but the store did not have anything from Belarus. I tried a few more stores in the neighborhood and came up empty. I wrote to Dima to ask if he knew where the supposedly Belarusian slippers came from and he said he didn’t, and couldn’t I just get our grandmother regular slippers? No, I could not, though I was beginning to wonder why. Her slippers were not so extraordinary; there were many Chinese and Russian and Ukrainian slippers just like them. But she insisted. A famous historian had once defined the Soviet people—Homo Sovieticus—as a “species whose most highly developed skills involved the hunting and gathering of scarce goods in an urban environment.” I had never developed these skills. It seemed unfair to demand of me that I develop them now.
Finally I confessed to my grandmother that I was having trouble finding Belarusian slippers. “Have you tried the market outside Olympic Stadium?” she asked. I had not. “Let’s go there,” said my grandmother, so we did.
Olympic Stadium was just one stop from us on the subway. It had been built for the 1980 Summer Olympics, the ones that had been boycotted by the West over the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and had hosted the boxing tournament (the Cubans won). In the 1990s, it had been taken over by small clothing stores, and though it was now active again as a stadium—Metallica was playing next month—the large open space in front of it had become a clothes market. We approached it from the Prospekt Mira (Peace Avenue) subway stop, across a large chaotic square that included a small church, a McDonald’s, and, cutting across the square, an active tramline. Periodically a tram would rumble through and people would clear out of the way for it. Moscow was crazy.
Eventually we reached a sea of little stalls. We toured them as quickly as we could, though my grandmother was in no hurry. She seemed, for once, to be having a good time. There were a fair number of dedicated shoe stalls, and my grandmother would go over and ask if they had any slippers from Belarus; after enough of them said no, she agreed to try on some slippers that were not from Belarus. Each of the little stalls had a stool she could sit on as she pulled off her loafers and experimented with some slippers. The salesladies were understanding. You spent half your life in slippers, after all. Choosing a pair was serious business.
My grandmother rejected all the slippers. This felt discouraging to me, but she didn’t mind. I guess we w
ere shopping. After about an hour of this, we finally headed back to the metro. But I would not be relating this exciting tale were it not for what happened next. As we made our way through the square with the McDonald’s and tram tracks and church on it, I noticed two teenage girls ahead of us carrying gym bags and figure skates; they looked flushed, as if they’d just been skating. Ordinarily I’d have been too shy to say anything, but an hour of watching my grandmother try on slippers had apparently lowered my inhibitions. I hailed the girls and asked if there was an ice rink nearby. They said yes and pointed back toward the stadium. “If you bend around the stadium and under, it’s right there, across from the swimming pool.”
“Do they play hockey there?”
“I think late in the evenings, yes.”
If that was true, and if I could get into a skate there, it would signal a remarkable change in my fortunes—this place was really close to our house.
I went the next evening after my grandmother had gone to bed. I didn’t bring my Ikea bag full of stuff this time. The entrance was across from the pool, just as the figure skaters said, and it had the usual Moscow security guards in cheap black suits stationed at it. When I asked where the hockey rink was, they pointed me down the corridor, and when I asked if it was all right for me to go there, they shrugged. This meant yes. I walked down the hall, descended some stairs, noticed some locker rooms to my left, and then opened a metal door to find—a hockey rink. It was not a professional rink like at Sokolniki, there were no stands for thousands of fans, and since it was under the stadium it was something like a secret rink—but it was a hockey rink nonetheless, it had that smell of mildew mixed with sweat mixed with trapped cold air, and guys were playing hockey on it.
I decided this time that I’d check the locker rooms. One was locked, another was empty, but in the third I found two guys about my age, one big, blue-eyed, and bald—I later learned his name was Grisha—the other smaller, a little older, with dark blond hair and a mean look on his face—Fedya. They were both sitting down next to unopened hockey bags and taping their sticks. Hockey players.
And then the same thing happened all over again. They didn’t want to let me play. I insisted. They said no. They couldn’t understand who I was. By this point the swelling in my cheek was gone, and I’d been speaking Russian continually for almost two months, meaning my small accent was also gone, and so I seemed to them like, basically, a regular guy. Why didn’t I have a network of people to whom I could appeal for an introduction to their hockey game? Grisha actually got up at one point and yelled, in his frustration at my refusal to leave, “Who are you and what do you want?!”
“I just want to play hockey,” I finally said. Grisha turned away in disgust, but Fedya, who had seemed like the mean one, said, “Come on Wednesday. Bring five hundred rubles.” I thanked him and got out of there before Grisha could rescind the invitation. Five hundred rubles would have been twenty dollars before the devaluation; now it was seventeen. I could live with that.
That was on a Friday. I spent the next five days imagining what playing hockey in Russia would be like, and then I found out. When I came in smiling to Fedya and Grisha’s locker room, Fedya barely looked up and without a hello simply said, “You’re on the other team,” and sent me to the neighboring locker room. The guys in there moved aside for me but otherwise paid me no attention. Out on the ice, Fedya and Grisha’s team subjected me to an extraordinary level of physical violence. I got hooked, hit from behind, and slashed, not least by big, bald Grisha. At one point one of their guys—not Grisha—slashed me so badly in the leg that I couldn’t take it anymore and slashed him back. He took real exception to this and made as if he were going to slash me in the head. At that point I didn’t care—I was not enjoying myself. One of the guys on my team pulled him back, marking pretty much the first acknowledgment from one of our guys that I was even there.
Fedya and Grisha’s team was good; they wore matching white jerseys and played together seamlessly. Our team was less good. We all wore different nonwhite jerseys (our goalie even wore a bright red one in the style of the old Soviet Olympic jerseys, with CCCP across the front) and did not play well together. On top of that, we had a bad attitude. On my first shift I got the puck in the offensive zone, chased it into the corner, and got plastered from behind by Grisha. The puck squirted away; my right wing, Anton, picked it up and tried to hit my left wing, Oleg, in the slot. But the pass was a little out of Oleg’s reach and got picked up instead by Grisha, who made a nice outlet pass to the right wing, who gave it to Fedya, who gave it back to the wing, who scampered down the boards and scored.
Our line came off; as soon as we reached the bench, Anton and Oleg started yelling at each other. They were big guys, over six feet tall, and a few years older than me; Anton wore a blue Ovechkin jersey from when he (Ovechkin) played for Dynamo; Oleg wore a red Karlovy Vary jersey and had a chubby, friendly face.
“What the fuck, Oleg!” Anton said. “Where were you looking?”
“Blyad’!” said Oleg. “What do you want from me? Put the pass a little closer to my stick and I’ll fucking get it. Fuck.”
This went on for the entire game. None of the guys yelled at me; they barely seemed to see me. But they kept yelling at each other.
In Boston, where I grew up playing, hockey players never yelled. In New York things were a little different; there was a Long Island school of hockey that was more exuberant, where guys talked more trash—but only to the other team. In Boston, entire skates could go by in total silence. If someone from the other team happened to say something to you, you were to give him a disdainful look and say, “Fuck you.” If he continued talking you could skate away or drop your gloves and fight. But more often than not, no one said anything. They just played.
I was, frankly, disgusted. We must have lost by six or seven goals and in the locker room afterward the mood was grim. No one invited me back for the next skate and I didn’t go. I would rather not play hockey, I thought, than play hockey with these dicks.
But by the next Wednesday, I was ready to try again. When I came into the locker room half an hour early, as a way of trying to establish a presence in the space, our goalie was already there. He was a small, thin guy, about my age, but a good goaltender—it wasn’t his fault the other team was much better than we were. “Ah,” he said now, “y-y-you’re here!” He had a slight stutter, and he was using the ty in a way that was clearly friendly. “We were wondering if you’d come. You may not have noticed, but we need some speed up front.” I was immensely grateful for this and laughed. “By the way, my name is Sergei,” he said. “Hello, Sergei,” I said, using the ty myself. We shook hands. Then we went out and lost again. Nonetheless, despite plenty of slashing and hooking against me, I felt better out on the ice. The guys were violent, but they were slow; I could take an extra half second and make sure my passes were accurate and then brace for a hit. I didn’t do anything extraordinary, but I began to have a sense of where I was. In the locker room afterward, one of the guys turned to me and said, “You coming on Friday?”
Another ty.
“Do you think I should?” I asked, using ty as well.
“I think you have to.”
“All right,” I said. I was on the team. It wasn’t a good team, and it was badly overmatched and indeed frequently humiliated by the white team, but nonetheless I was on it. One of the guys even asked me about my Ikea bag. “Is that comfortable?” he said.
“It’s OK,” I lied. “It lets my stuff breathe.”
The guy nodded—a little skeptically, but still.
As for my grandmother’s slippers, a few weeks after our failed trip to Olympic Stadium I was walking through an underground crossing on my way to a hockey store to get my skates sharpened when I saw a lady selling slippers. They looked sort of like my grandmother’s. “Excuse me,” I said, “where are these from?”
“Gomel,” said the wom
an.
“In Belarus?”
“Yeah, so? They’re just as good as Russian ones.”
“No, that’s great!” I cried, much to her surprise. Belarusians were sensitive about their products, post-Chernobyl. I bought two pairs and stuck them in my Ikea bag. My grandmother was very pleased and bragged continually on the phone about it to Emma Abramovna. I’m sure Emma Abramovna was thrilled.
And in the meantime, Dima had come to visit.
9.
DIMA COMES TO MOSCOW
ALL HAPPY FAMILIES are alike; ours, obviously, was not a happy family.
What had we done wrong? By most measures, you would have thought we’d done everything right. For a few years in the late 1970s, the Soviets allowed the emigration of their Jews. First they sent the criminals and critics (“Let them rob and criticize the Americans!”), but there were only so many criminals and critics, and they eventually started letting out computer programmers like my father and literary scholars like my mother. My parents weren’t stupid. When you are given a chance to emigrate from a poor, decrepit, crumbling country to a wealthy, powerful, dynamic one, you take it. They took it. They filed their application, bribed someone who said they’d help, sold all their stuff—and off we went.
It wasn’t easy. I was six years old when we came over, and even I could tell. We stayed with another family at first, then in a weird apartment in Brighton, at the very edge of respectable Boston. Someone stole our security deposit. With my father’s first substantial paycheck we bought a giant, ugly car. As my parents drove around Brighton visiting their Russian friends—all their friends were Russian—I sprawled on the backseat and slept.
Eventually they figured it out, my father went from good job to better, and my mother became one of the few literary Russians to actually find a literary job. We moved from Brighton to Brookline to aristocratic Newton. But through it all Dima flung himself at the frustrations and limitations of our new life. He denounced the Russians my parents hung out with as losers; he dismissed his new classmates as idiots. He had hated the Soviet Union, he said, but at least in the Soviet Union there were people you could talk to.