A Terrible Country

by Keith Gessen

  “She’s been in that apartment practically her entire life.”

  “What does that matter? She can’t remember what she had for breakfast.”

  “But she knows where stuff is. She can orient herself.”

  “We’ll set up the new place with her stuff, we’ll put it in the same places. Like at Emma Abramovna’s.”

  I thought a second. “Why don’t you sell your own apartment?”

  “Oh, I will,” said Dima. “But the buyer I have wants both apartments so he can combine them. He’s willing to pay a premium for that.”

  “No,” I said. “You can’t do that to her.”

  “I can’t?” Dima looked at me like he was studying something on my nose. “I’m sorry. I must have missed all your contributions to Grandma’s health and well-being these past fifteen years. Did you do them in secret?” Dima paused as if waiting for an answer. “No? You didn’t? So you haven’t actually been here all this time, and you haven’t actually set foot in this country in however many years, and you don’t actually know anything about what’s going on? I thought so.”

  He sat back momentarily with his expensive drink. It had an orange peel in it. He was so much older than me that we had never wrestled or fought the way brothers do, and anyway he wasn’t the wrestling type. He was all brain, and the brain was devoted to maximizing profit and proving he was right. And in this instance he was right. I’d been in America all this time. My grandmother had descended into senility without me. That I had finally showed up didn’t change that.

  I asked, “When are you planning on doing this?”

  “As soon as possible. If you leave around Thanksgiving, that would be great, we could probably get three hundred for the place. I might need to borrow a hundred out of it for my legal fees. The rest, two hundred thousand, we put in a Grandma fund—for renting her a place, hiring a live-in nurse, and any medical expenses that she incurs in the coming years. If her burn rate is about three thousand a month, that’s, what, sixty-six months, five and a half years. That’s a long time for her.”

  “Yeah,” I said. Our grandmother was not going to live another five and a half years.

  “Half that money is yours and I should be able to get it back to you within two to three years. We can draw up a contract.”

  “I don’t need any money.”

  “OK, Mr. Moneybucks. We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.”

  I sat in silence. I had been looking forward to going back but this was different; if I left, it would mean my grandmother having to move to some random place.

  “So what do you think?” said Dima.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I need to think about it.”

  “OK,” said Dima. “Think about it.”

  He then made some gesture that I didn’t catch, and one of the girls came over and sat in Dima’s lap. She was topless, and she clearly knew Dima; he whispered something in her ear and she laughed. He turned to me. “Vera says she has a friend who’d like to meet you. Should we invite her over?” Then he added, in English, “It’s on me.”

  Part of me wanted to take him up on it but another part did not. In any case I was too confused by Dima’s news. I thanked Vera and Dima and said I was going to head home. Dima shrugged. “See you there,” he said, and that was the end of our conversation.

  I took a roundabout way home so I could clear my head. The evenings were growing colder. I was in a sweater and a fall coat but it was not enough. Until now I had been so eager to leave. I walked past the expensive cafés that I didn’t like, the Hugo Boss, the experimental theater. . . . I was just getting used to this place. And I had maybe found a hockey game. But maybe too it was for the best. I was not exactly the world’s greatest caretaker of my grandmother.

  Did I think Dima should stay? I mean, between going to prison and leaving, of course he should leave. But it didn’t sit well with me somehow. There had always been a kind of moral argument that Dima made alongside his moneymaking. He wasn’t just coming to Russia to make a killing; he was coming to build capitalism, democracy, a modern nation. He was continuing the work begun by the great Soviet dissidents whom my parents so admired. That’s why he could get so high and mighty on Facebook or when Elena interviewed him on Echo. It’s why he could sleep with strippers and still think of himself as a righteous dude—he was building the new Russia! Of course he had to blow off some steam! Now he was leaving. And that was OK. But if the idea had been to build something, and it was still unbuilt . . . did that mean the idea had never been to build anything at all?

  Maybe I was being unfair. But one saw the same thing in academia. People came to Russia, interviewed Russians, wrote their articles and books—and then they got a job, or tenure, or the Nobel Prize, and what did the Russians get from it exactly? All this money that the Russians now had, it wasn’t from Dima coming over and building gas stations, and it sure as hell wasn’t from some academic writing articles. It was from Uncle Lev and the great Jewish-Italian defector Pontecorvo figuring out the goddamn molecular nature of oil. It was from Uncle Lev building instruments to detect neutron emissions. No Americans ever came over and showed the Russians how to find their oil; the Russians did it all on their own.

  When I got home, my grandmother was in the kitchen in her nightgown, drinking a cup of tea. She had her teeth out and gave me a toothless smile when I sat down across from her. She always looked very cute without her teeth, like a very old, wise, gray-haired baby.

  “Andryush,” she said, “you’re home. I was worried. Where did you go?”

  “I was out with Dima.”

  “Dima? Is he here?”

  “Yes.”

  “He’s my grandson, you know,” said my grandmother sadly. “He lives in London now.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “Are you hungry?” she asked. “There’s some pancakes with jam. Do you want some?”

  She started to pull herself up by the table and I stopped her. “I’ll get them,” I said.

  The pancakes were on the windowsill—it was really more like a window alcove, it was two feet deep—in an aluminum dish, covered by another dish; my grandmother owned no Tupperware. I put two on a plate and came back to the table. My grandmother was slowly, methodically sipping her tea.

  Dima and I had just spent I didn’t know how much money on those drinks. Thirty dollars? And Dima was no doubt going to spend quite a bit more. How much was Vera’s cleaning fee? Two hundred dollars? Five hundred? I had no idea, but five hundred struck me as plausible. That was the entirety of my grandmother’s life savings.

  “My mother used to make these pancakes,” my grandmother said suddenly. “She wasn’t a good cook. She was a dancer. And she was very good at chess. She was one of the best female chess players in Moscow.”

  I had never heard any of this before.

  “Yes,” said my grandmother, “she was very talented but she didn’t like children. But once in a while we would come home from school and she’d be there and she’d have these pancakes for us to eat.”

  My poor little grandmother, I thought. She had lived such a long life, but she still remembered her mother’s pancakes.

  It was wrong that she was alone like this. And it happened because we had emigrated. It didn’t seem that way at the time—at the time it was a great adventure—but by leaving we had ruptured the generations. We had abandoned my grandmother. It took a while to unspool all its ramifications, but that emigration, more than anything, was the great tragedy of my grandmother’s life.

  “Do you want to play anagrams?” I asked her.

  Her eyes widened. “Of course!” she said. And we played three games. She slaughtered me. Then we went to sleep. Whenever it was Dima came home, I did not hear him.

  * * *

  • • •

  The next morning I wrote to the drummer that my plans had changed,
and if he hadn’t yet made other arrangements, he could stay. He wrote back right away to say that he hadn’t, and would be happy to stay.

  Telling Dima was more difficult, but—uncharacteristically for me, it must be said—I decided not to put it off. I told him I wanted to stay a few more months, that I was just getting started here, and that I didn’t think we should move my grandmother while I was still around to help. He took it better than I expected. “All right,” he said. “If you’re here to help her up the stairs, we save on a caretaker, so fine. But if the place loses value, I’m taking it out of your end.”

  “OK,” I said.

  Dima was in Moscow an entire week. We ran a couple of household errands together and watched the election returns come in, and Obama’s speech, on his computer, but other than that I hardly saw him. He slipped in and out of the apartment like a ghost, either very early in the morning or very late at night. He was avoiding my grandmother, I think, and she could tell. Every time she saw him, she said, “Dima! I’m so proud of you! You’ve made such a great career for yourself! We heard you on the radio! If only you would come see me once in a while! I’m right here!”

  “Grandma, I have to go,” Dima would say, looking at his phone and putting on his coat and boots and hat. “We’ll talk about this later, OK?”

  “Can’t you stay a little bit?” my grandmother would say. “We’ll play anagrams.”

  “I can’t right now.”

  “Just one game?”

  “I can’t.”

  “You never can.”

  “I’m very busy!”

  The more she pressed, the more he pulled away. I recognized the dynamic. He thought she was criticizing him, minimizing or even ignoring all the time he had spent with her over the years, all the attention he had given her, whereas she was merely stating a wish and also, I now saw, helplessly trying to think of something to say. There was Dima. What to say to him? And the first thing that came out was always some kind of rebuke. She was just trying to make conversation, to get him to stick around a moment longer, to engage.

  I watched it and became so sad. Perhaps I could do things differently. Dima was going to leave. But I was going to stay.

  PART II

  1.

  IT GETS COLD OUT

  AFTER DIMA LEFT it grew cold. First it was a little cold, but one could manage, and after that it was a little colder—and then it became very, very cold.

  It wasn’t a wet cold, and there wasn’t a lot of wind. It was just really fucking cold. Ten degrees Fahrenheit was ordinary. If it got down to zero, that was tough. If it got up to twenty, people loosened their collars and took off their hats.

  On an average day, before leaving the house, you had to wonder: Will I freeze to death? Anywhere you wanted to go, you were going to end up walking. The city was very big. The streets were very wide. As you walked there wouldn’t be any pockets of warmth to hide in. What if you fell? What if you got lost or discouraged? In blockaded Leningrad during the war people would just collapse on the street from hunger and cold and that was it. Others would step over them. Eventually someone would come to collect the frozen body.

  After a week of this cold I made the determination that the winter coat with which I’d been making do in New York wouldn’t cut it, and with my grandmother’s permission I raided the standing closet in the back room. There to my amazement I found a green telogreyka, literally “body warmer.” I had seen them in old photos of Soviet workers, including in the Gulag—they were work jackets with a green outer lining stuffed with cotton wool batting. Most important, they were warm. Uncle Lev must have gotten one while working at an oil field. And it must have been when he was a younger, more robust man, because when I tried it on it fit me perfectly. I now had a winter jacket, albeit one in a somewhat hipsterish vein. There was also a red hiking backpack with the word CПОРТ on the back into which I could, with some creative arranging, fit all my hockey stuff. I discarded my Ikea bag and from there on out made my way to hockey with a nice red Soviet backpack.

  Soon I was going to hockey a lot. Our team was getting badly beaten by the white team each Wednesday and Friday, and yet I couldn’t get enough. I was dazzled by the white team. They were not, individually, superskilled players, but they had played together a long time and they knew how to use the large ice surface. Their breakout (from the defensive zone) was different from anything I had ever seen. Growing up, our breakouts had been simple: as the defenseman got the puck down low, the wings waited near the blue line, and if they were open, they received the first pass, which they redirected either to the center or up the boards; if the wings were covered, the center looped back toward the goal and received a short pass from the defenseman and tried to go from there. The white team played a longer game: they sent their wings to the opposite blue line and then had them curl back toward the puck; the defenseman rifled the puck to the wing coming back, and the wing redirected it to the center coming out of the zone. It was in certain ways the same play—the defenseman passed to the wing, who passed to the center—and in this variation the center received the puck just a few feet farther along than in the breakout I was accustomed to. But both the players and the puck traveled a greater distance, and this in itself was valuable, as it stretched the defense and made the ensuing attack more difficult to defend. And it required a skill in passing—both in making passes and in receiving them—that was remarkable. With one exception—a pudgy young forward named Alyosha—the white players were not fast, but every single one of them was a good passer. Alyosha played with Fedya, whom I had met on my very first day and who I’d since learned was the owner of a small chain of restaurants in the city center, and consequently a man who had to deal with all sorts of criminal and semi-criminal organizations. Fedya had a preternatural sense of where everyone was. Perhaps he had developed it while looking out for the mob. Now he used it to deliver the puck to Alyosha quietly, swiftly, and with deadly accuracy. Then Alyosha scored. We were powerless to stop them.

  But maybe I could stop them, I thought, if I could just get better. Every time someone mentioned a different skate, provided that it was in the evening, I would go. “There’s a game on Saturday nights near the Kyrgyzia movie theater,” one of our defensemen, Ilya, said one day. “Three hundred rubles. Want to come?” I did. It was way out on the edge of the city, at the last stop on the yellow line, just past the movie theater, and the locker room was a little shed in the parking lot. There weren’t any showers. But the ice was good, the price was half what we paid at Olympic Stadium, and the guys were friendly—they were simpler, poorer, and some of them had gold teeth. They laughed a lot, looked forward to heading for their dachas (even in the dead of winter) and to drinking some beer. After I found this game, I also found a third, on Mondays: it was at the Institute of Physical Culture, which I later learned was the birthplace of Soviet hockey; the rink was decrepit, with poor heating in the locker rooms, and on the ice a gulley several inches wide along the boards, where if the puck fell in you had to stand there and fish it out. I didn’t care. I wanted more hockey. Soon I was playing six nights a week. The puck began to stick to my blade. The ice came to seem a more natural place to be than the ground.

  Traveling all over to play hockey, I saw the strangest things. Once you left the center of the city—which, to be sure, had its own strangenesses—but once you escaped the immediate vicinity of the Kremlin, it was as if civilization fell away. Or rather it was as if some other civilization—the Soviet one—had come here, like the glaciers of the Ice Age, and erected its massive apartment towers, twelve and sixteen stories high, some of them the length of an entire block, some of them so long that the builders had slightly curved them, as if taking into account the curvature of the Earth. And then, like the glaciers, this Soviet civilization retreated. Now a new civilization had taken over these decrepit apartment blocks and erected its own monuments: car garages, giant ugly shopping malls, horrible mazelik
e markets the size of airports. But also, to make up for all that: hockey rinks. For one skate, on Sundays, I had to take the subway as far as it would go, get on a crowded trolleybus, walk through a semi-apocalyptic landscape along a raised highway and a massive aboveground gas line, before finally arriving at the rink, which was nestled between some apartment blocks as if it were a secret.

  There were streets out here, and sidewalks, but most people and cars ignored them. All the spaces between the apartment blocks had been converted into streets. If it was not a house, it was a street; if not a street, then a house. That was all.

  Going out into the exurbs like this—riding the metro to its last stops, transferring to a bus, and still having to walk through a barren landscape—was revelatory. This is how most of the people in the city lived. The distances were unbelievable. No wonder they were always in such a lousy mood.

  I never felt unsafe when going out to these places, though there were always some drunk people hanging around, and occasionally I’d see gangs of teens looking for trouble. I was still a little skittish from getting hit in the face with a gun. But for one thing, the guy who’d hit me with a gun had jumped out of a black Mercedes SUV, and there weren’t a lot of those rolling through the courtyards and onto the sidewalks of outer Moscow; out here you got more of a taste of what Russian auto manufacturing had been up to (mostly it was making cars that looked like Hyundais and cheap compact Fords). And for another thing, I had a hockey stick in my hands and I knew how to use it. So I kept going, and playing, and getting better.

  Even so, we couldn’t beat the white team. There were just so many of them, and no matter how fast I got, the puck was always faster. It didn’t help that my team sucked. I remember one time during this period—I was probably in the best shape of my hockey life postcollege—when I got the puck in the neutral zone and saw that Grisha was on his way. I sent the puck against the boards, sidestepped Grisha, and picked the puck up again on the other side; but now Grisha’s partner, Sasha, the most violent person on their team (Grisha was merely the most dirty), was coming at me. There was no escaping this one; just before he made contact, I managed to slip the puck through his legs to my right wing, Anton, who was charging beside me. Sasha clobbered me to the ice but Anton was in alone. Then he blew it. He chugged in, awkwardly hugging the puck, and as the goalie went down, shot it over the net.