A Terrible Country

by Keith Gessen

  “What the fuck d’you do that for?” Oleg, my left wing, asked him when we were back on the bench.

  “I was trying to get it over him,” said Anton.

  “You just have to hit the net, you asshole.”

  “I was trying! And where were you? Andrei was getting fucked over there and where were you?”

  “Fuck you,” said Oleg.

  And so on. They always yelled at each other, never at me. And of course we lost again.

  * * *

  • • •

  Walking to hockey in the cold, my breath visible before me, I thought about money. I had never not thought about money, but until now it had been in the nature of a game: Could I make do on $25,000 in New York? What about $22,000? And so on. But it had never seemed like a crime on my part that I didn’t have money. Now it did. If I could only buy out my brother’s share of the apartment, my grandmother wouldn’t have to move. But there was no way I could get my hands on that much money, and it was just a matter of time before he kicked her out.

  At hockey—my original hockey, where we kept getting whipped by the white team—the guys talked about money. I tried to follow their conversation in case it yielded useful advice. This was not easy. I had grown up speaking Russian with my parents, I’d been in the country speaking nothing but Russian for three months, and still I had trouble keeping up. The problem was their cursing. They did not merely curse; they replaced ordinary words with curses. Verbs were the most common victims. “I’ve been taking my rubles and cunting them across the border,” Tolya said once. “They fuck there for a while, and I cock them back here again.” I think Tolya was describing a simple currency maneuver, changing rubles to euros to take advantage of the faltering ruble. But I couldn’t be sure.

  With the exception of Sergei, our goalie, who drove an old Russian car and hardly spoke in the locker room, the hockey guys all worked in some kind of business. Oleg, my left wing, owned property that he leased out; Anton, my right wing, was a corporate lawyer; Tolya was a banker; Vanya owned a sugar factory; and Ilya was CEO of an agricultural concern. They drove expensive German cars. But they were not like Dima’s friends—they were cruder, less educated, and they were not already spiritually half in the West. They were Russian, they had made their money in Russia, and they were going to die Russians, even if they died in a house they’d bought on the southern coast of Spain.

  The guys traveled a lot, and not just to fuck rubles. They knew the flight schedule from Moscow to Frankfurt as well as businessmen in Boston know the Delta shuttle schedule to New York. But they were not under the illusion that they belonged anywhere but where they were.

  “Frankfurt is a fucking airport,” Tolya said. “I like to get there early for my flights and fuck a beer or two.”

  “Frankfurt is nice, but have you been to Istanbul?” said Vanya. “I fucked through there on my way to Dubai last year and I just cocked out. The fucking Turks! I was ashamed, to be honest. You’d be cunted to find a hotel in Russia with furniture as nice as they had at this fucking airport.”

  “Yes,” said Anton. “That’s what happens when half of every dollar doesn’t get cunted. You can fuck something nice.”

  There were so few actual words that sometimes the guys themselves got confused. “Everything in Germany is cunted,” Vanya said at one point. My understanding was that “cunted” usually meant “bad,” but the way Vanya said it, drawing it out, “cuuunted,” like he was impressed, left room for interpretation.

  “You mean good cunted or bad cunted?” Anton asked.

  “Good cunted!” Vanya said. He thought about it for a second and added: “If I’d said things in Russia were cunted, that would mean bad.”

  Everybody laughed.

  “What do you say, Seryoga?” Ilya addressed our goalie, Sergei. He was putting on his red CCCP goalie shirt. “In the USSR things were different, no?”

  Sergei smiled. “W-w-well yeah,” he said. “Things were stable. You guys wouldn’t have to worry about cunting your rubles. You could sleep well at night and think about hockey.”

  “You’re right,” said Tolya, standing up. “It’s time to play some hockey.”

  We went out and played and lost, 8 to 1.

  There was no way I’d ever earn enough money to buy Dima out. A hundred and fifty thousand dollars was a hundred and fifty PMOOC classes—it would take me twenty years. Even if I got a real professor job with a real professor salary I’d be making only about sixty or seventy grand a year. If I miraculously saved half my salary it would still take five years. By then it would be too late.

  * * *

  • • •

  Still, getting an academic job wouldn’t hurt. A couple of times a week there was a lecture or reading by a writer or scholar at a bookstore/bar called Bilingua, and I started attending these. I listened to talks on the use of Pushkin in Soviet propaganda; the concept of “Ukraine” in nineteenth-century Russian thought; and the “indigenization” campaign in the Soviet ethnic republics in the 1920s. All of it was interesting, and though nothing was quite up my alley, I felt like there might be some kernel of a project for me to pick up. One evening I came home from a lecture—they were always at six, i.e., when my grandmother became most restless—to find that she was gone. Her slippers were by the door, her coat was not on the rack, there was no note on the kitchen table. She had just up and left.

  This was not totally without precedent. My grandmother still did her own grocery shopping, though with the onset of the cold she was more likely to ask me to do it. She would occasionally go for a walk in the neighborhood by herself. A few times I had returned from the Coffee Grind to find her gone, and yet she had returned safely. But it had not been her practice to leave by herself during the evenings. As I was thinking this through I got a call from Emma Abramovna. “Andrei,” she said, “is Seva there?” My grandmother had told Emma Abramovna that she was coming over. But she was supposed to have been there an hour ago. It was not like my grandmother to be late.

  I hung up in a panic, put my telogreyka back on, and rushed outside. I ran down to Tsvetnoi Boulevard, which was on the way to Emma Abramovna’s, in case my grandmother had failed to hail a car and just started walking. Nothing. I ran back to Clean Ponds in case she had started walking in the wrong direction: nothing. I even ran down to the police station on Sretenka, where I was greeted by a fresh-faced young cop who was obviously perplexed by my Gulag coat—the only other person I’d seen wearing one like it was the guy who ate from our dumpster—but nonetheless took my number and said they’d call me if they found a confused elderly lady in the neighborhood. Eventually I decided that the best place for me to be was at home, in case she called, and about twenty minutes after I returned I heard her key scratching at the door. I ran out and found my grandmother half frozen to death and frightened. She had hailed a cab, she told me, as I covered her with a blanket and gave her hot tea, but there had been a lot of traffic, and the driver had left the usual route to Emma Abramovna’s. My grandmother found that she did not remember the address. They got hopelessly lost and drove around central Moscow for a while. Finally she gave up, and the driver started heading back in this direction. She had caught an actual taxi, a rarity in Moscow and significantly more expensive than an ordinary private car, and she saw that the meter was approaching a thousand rubles. “But we never reached our destination,” she said to the driver.

  “That’s not my fault,” he said. The ride to Emma Abramovna’s usually cost one hundred rubles, and my grandmother had only five hundred with her. She told this to the driver, who told her to get out. She knew how to get home from there, but it was almost a mile, and it was cold. As she told this story Emma Abramovna called and my little grandmother picked up the phone and started telling her what happened. Then she became exhausted and said she’d call her back. When she got off the phone, she began to cry. She sat in her chair at the kitchen table, cradlin
g the phone receiver, and cried.

  After that I stopped attending the lectures at Bilingua. I could see them some other time. If my grandmother wanted to go to Emma Abramovna’s, I went along. I even cut down a little bit on my hockey playing, though the games at Olympic Stadium were late enough at night that they never interfered with something my grandmother and I might be doing.

  Of course we kept losing to the white team, and I felt increasingly frustrated. During one game not long after my grandmother’s terrible adventure, I got the puck from Oleg at the top of the slot. I should have taken a wrist shot but I was feeling angry. I wound up for a slap shot instead. When my stick hit the ice it broke in half. The top half stayed in my hands, the bottom half went flying into the corner, and the puck dribbled feebly toward the goal. Anton loaned me his stick for the remainder of the game. In the locker room afterward he asked if I wanted to cut the stick down so it was my size and keep it. I did not like the lie on his blade but a new stick would cost $150. “Yes,” I said. “Thank you.” And from then on I played with Anton’s shitty stick.

  2.

  I EXPAND MY SOCIAL CIRCLE

  I WENT ACROSS the hall once in a while to have a beer with the soldiers, but I never went out with them again after the incident at Teatr, and in general my social life was pretty barren. Periodically, Dima’s friend Maxim invited me to a party or art opening. I never went. I knew that if I went out with that crowd there would always come a moment when I would be called upon to chip in fifty dollars for a bar or restaurant tab, and that it would mean I wouldn’t be able to go to the Coffee Grind for a week. Also, I was embarrassed about trying to kiss Elena. So I stayed home.

  I was perplexed by the hockey guys. That they rarely exchanged pleasantries or smiled was now something I was accustomed to—Vanya once tried to smile at me, as a way of making me feel at home, and instead resembled a wolf flashing his teeth. But it was odd that they never wanted to have a beer. In America it was traditional to have some beers in the locker room after a skate, even if you didn’t know the people you were skating with; if you played with guys for a while, you’d eventually go and drink at a bar and learn things about them. In Russia, where you could sometimes end up drinking with people you just met on the street, I figured we’d be having beers in no time. But it never happened. One evening I decided to force the issue and brought some beers with me, to see if anyone wanted one. All the guys politely declined, and I carried the beers home with me like an idiot.

  Still, I noticed that my linemates, Anton and Oleg, had begun staying in the locker room later and later, taking their time and chatting after getting dressed. They were funny guys. Anton was probably the worst player on our team—a poor skater, he also had a shoulder injury that caused him to keep only one hand on his stick most of the time—but he was a garrulous presence in the locker room and had been on the team a long time. He drove a large black Mercedes to the arena. Oleg was a different story: he was a talented player, tall and rangy, with a terrific slap shot. But he was lazy. If the puck wasn’t right there for him, he declined to skate for it; then he would come to the bench to complain. This was not my brand of hockey. And it was possible that I had been put on a line with Anton and Oleg because no one else wanted to play with them. In any case, my line it was.

  I gradually learned their stories. Anton was just under forty. He had a math degree from one of the top Moscow universities; if he’d graduated a few years earlier, he’d have gone into one of the research institutes, like Uncle Lev, and then spent years trying to figure out how to escape. Instead he went straight into business. He and some programmer friends created a piece of workflow software they thought might be useful for human resources departments, but this went nowhere; then they made a video game, which went better. The legal environment for Russian business in the 1990s was so complex that Anton started taking law classes at night, in part to keep himself and his partners out of trouble. Eventually he had enough credits for a law degree, and with his help the company pivoted out of the volatile (and dangerous, even in video games) retail environment and into legal services. For over a decade now he’d been making a good living providing legal advice to new Russian businesses; one of their most popular services was setting up offshore shell companies to avoid onerous (or any) Russian taxes.

  Oleg had a more exciting history. He was a few years younger than Anton and was from a humbler background, so had not had the wherewithal to avoid the army; as a fairly bright young man, though, he’d done his service in the Far East as a radar operator, monitoring American signals traffic. This was considered prestigious and intellectual, and when he got out he was offered work at the KGB and a spot at a top university for diplomats (with ties to the KGB). That wasn’t Oleg’s bag, and he decided instead to go into business. His first scheme was to arbitrage the limited hours that liquor stores were open during Gorbachev’s anti-alcohol campaign. Young Oleg bought up cheap wine at the liquor store in the evening and then headed to the same store early in the morning the next day to sell it at a markup to winos who were already in line, waiting for the store to open. Having thus accumulated some capital, he invested it, after the USSR collapsed, in an old car that he drove to Ukraine to buy cheap cigarettes, which he brought back to Moscow to sell. He’d fill the entire trunk, then sell them on the street or to middlemen, all the while hoping he didn’t get pulled over by the police, who would need to be bribed. This was hard work, but it paid well and eventually Oleg had enough money and contacts to buy, very cheaply, ninety-nine-year leases on two commercial properties in central Moscow. Now he rented them out to foreign banks—a European bank on Tverskaya and, incredibly, the HSBC where my grandmother and I deposited the soldiers’ rent. He had revenue of about $25,000 a month and very few expenses and basically just hung out all day and took people to lunch.

  Oleg and his wife and young son lived on the Rublevka highway, an elite section on the outskirts of the city where a lot of government officials, including Putin, also lived, mostly in large houses. Anton lived with his father and a teenage son in the old family apartment near Moscow University. He had another son, who lived with the son’s mother in Spain; he visited them frequently. Oleg had a summer house in Spain. They often talked about how they would figure out a way to see each other over the summer, when they both planned on being in Spain.

  Oleg was very nervous about the financial crisis, and occasionally asked me if I had any insight into how his bank tenants were viewed in the West. “Are people saying they’ll pull through this thing?” he would ask, to which I would say, “I have no idea,” and he would nod ruefully, as if, yes, I was right, no one really had any idea.

  One night after hockey, Oleg suggested the three of us go out. I immediately agreed. I thought we’d go somewhere and have some beers finally, but instead we went to one of the expensive cafés along Sretenka and Anton and Oleg both ordered fruit juices. It turned out the reason no one ever had any beers was that there was a de facto zero tolerance policy for drunk driving. If you had even the bare minimum of a whiff of beer on your breath, you’d get shaken down for a serious fine. But also, these guys, when they drank, they drank a lot. “When I drink,” said Oleg, “I tend to drink for several days. So I try not to drink.”

  But mostly, of course, we talked about money. “So listen,” said Oleg. “How much is a house in America?”

  I told him it depended on the location.

  “Could I get something nice for a lemon?” A “lemon” was a million dollars.

  “Yes,” I said. “Definitely.”

  This pleased Oleg.

  “You know what I’d do?” said Anton. “I’d get a small house in a small town and use it as a base and just go everywhere on my motorcycle.” Anton, it turned out, loved traveling by motorcycle. He’d traversed all of Europe and parts of South America on one. “I’d come back to the house, get some sleep, and then go out again,” he said.

  “So how much is
a little house?” Oleg asked me.

  “It depends.”

  “Could Anton get one for fifty things?” A “thing” was a thousand dollars.

  “No,” I said. “But he could get something for one hundred fifty.”

  “How about New York?” said Oleg. “What’s commercial property like?”

  “Expensive,” I said, guessing.

  “What if I wanted to buy a ground floor to rent it out?” asked Oleg.

  “Like your banks?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t know.” I had no idea. “We could look it up. But in Manhattan, my guess would be five million.”

  “For just the ground floor?”

  “I don’t know if you could buy only the ground floor. But if you could, then yes, something like that.”

  “Even now?” He meant with the financial crisis.

  “Even now,” I said. To the best of my knowledge, Manhattan was still expensive.

  Oleg took this in. Five million was clearly more money than he had. And it turned out there was a deeper reason he was asking these questions. “Motherfucker,” he said now. “My Europeans said they’re leaving.” HSBC was staying but the European bank on Tverskaya was pulling up stakes. Oleg was in the process of searching for a new tenant. “If I don’t find another tenant soon,” he said, “I’ll be cunted.”