A Terrible Country

by Keith Gessen

  “Don’t worry,” said Anton. “Something will turn up.”

  “Yeah, probably,” said Oleg, though he looked worried.

  The guys had another round of fruit juices, and then we headed home.

  * * *

  • • •

  We were getting into December and the semester was winding down. Jeff, the professor, liked to add a book at the end of the syllabus that was from the twentieth century or later, to try to bring things into the modern era. For this semester he assigned Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales.

  I had not read them. I had taken an entire seminar on Solzhenitsyn in grad school and by the end of it I had had my fill of the camps. It was as much a reaction to my fellow students, who became so melodramatic when discussing the Gulag, as it was to Solzhenitsyn, who seemed to be yelling all the time. I couldn’t take either of them.

  At least I understood why Solzhenitsyn was yelling. But why were my fellow grad students so sad? We weren’t in the Gulag. You’d think this realization would have made them happy.

  “Why such a long face?” I finally said one time as Fishman was going on and on about how terrible the camps were. “We’re in New York. Look outside!”

  “It’s important to bear witness to this suffering,” said Fishman. “It’s the least we can do.”

  So I was, I thought, done with the Gulag and hesitant to start in on Shalamov. But almost the first thing I learned about him—from an edition of his memoirs I found at the bookstore under the strip club—was that he hated Solzhenitsyn. This was encouraging. He had, it turned out, a different vision of the camps. He wasn’t bitter about them. He did not seek vengeance in this life for the misfortunes that had befallen him, in part because he knew that many of the men who had harmed him in the camps had themselves been harmed much worse by others—they had been shot, or tortured, or beaten to death, just as they had beaten others to death. He had no interest in preaching about the meaning of his time in the camps. But he did want to record it. From this, people could draw their own conclusions. You might say that Shalamov had a touching belief in the power of art.

  I had Shalamov on the table, then, when my grandmother came into the kitchen and asked me what I was reading. I showed her the book.

  “Shalamov,” she said sadly. “Yes.”

  She sat down across from me.

  “Klavdia Giorgievna knew him,” she said.

  I had never heard of a Klavdia Giorgievna but somehow I figured it out. “Aunt Klava?” I said.

  “Yes. She was in Kazakhstan.”

  “I didn’t know that,” I said. I had not known that.

  “She wasn’t anyone’s aunt, of course,” said my grandmother.

  “What?”

  “I told people she was my aunt. From Pereyaslavl’. I even told Yolka that.”

  This was correct. Aunt Klava, who had lived in the apartment when my mother was growing up, had died before my parents were married, so I’d heard very little about her. My understanding was that she’d survived the war in Ukraine and then come to Moscow alone.

  “Her husband was a big Hungarian communist,” my grandmother said now. “He came to build Communism. They gave him this apartment. Then they arrested him. And Klavdia Giorgievna too. He died, but she survived. And then she came back.

  “We were already living here. With Yolka. She came back and I didn’t know what to do. It had been her apartment.”

  Somehow I had never thought about the fact that for my grandmother to receive a Stalin apartment, someone else had to lose it.

  “So we agreed that I’d keep the apartment but she could live here in the meantime. She lived in your room and helped me with Yolka. She was a wonderful woman, a doctor.”

  “I didn’t know,” I said.

  “No one knew. I didn’t even tell Yelochka. I didn’t want her to have to lie to people. And then when it no longer mattered it was too late.”

  My grandmother played with the little iron saltcellar on the table.

  “I sometimes think I should have moved out then and there,” she said. “The minute she showed up, I should have left. Andryush, what do you think?”

  What did I think? Who cares what I thought? And yet I had noticed this happening more and more—my grandmother treating me like someone who could be appealed to for moral guidance.

  “I don’t know,” I said. I was still taking in the news about Aunt Klava. “You also needed somewhere to live.”

  “That’s true.”

  “And . . .” I began, thinking of what to say. A whole ethics had grown up around Stalinism that was, at times, hard to parse. Solzhenitsyn, who had suffered so mildly in the camps, had declared the principle “Do not live a lie,” meaning, “Do not participate in the deceptions of the regime.” This would certainly include taking an apartment from Stalin for your work on a propaganda film and staying in it after the repressed former owner returned. My grandmother had lived a lie. But what did Solzhenitsyn do? He proclaimed his principle; he won the Nobel Prize; then in his later years he cozied up to Putin, surrendering in one widely televised smile (Putin came to visit him) the moral authority it had taken him fifty years to build.

  I had been reading Shalamov. What would Shalamov say? Shalamov saw things differently from Solzhenitsyn. He saw them doubly, ambivalently. He thought Solzhenitsyn was a windbag. Physical pain, hunger, and bitter cold: these could not be “overcome” by the spirit. Nor did the world divide neatly, as it did for Solzhenitsyn, between friends and enemies of the regime. For Shalamov, in the camps there were people who helped him and there were people who brought him harm (who beat him, stole his food, ratted him out), but the majority of the people he encountered did neither. They were just, like him, trying to survive. There was great brutality in the camps, and very little heroism. In his memoirs he told a remarkable story about learning, at one of the darkest moments of his camp life, that his sister-in-law, Asya, with whom he was close, was in a nearby camp. Shalamov was in the hospital with dysentery, and one of the doctors wanted to know if he wished to send Asya a message. Only half alive, Shalamov scribbled her a short and unsentimental note. “Asya,” it said, “I’m very sick. Send some tobacco.” That was all. Shalamov clearly remembered this with shame, but also with understanding: he was weak, on the edge of death, and had been reduced to a bare animal existence. There was no great lesson in this, except that in certain conditions a man quickly ceases to be a man.

  It was nothing personal, as the saying goes. Just the twentieth century. I now wondered if, having learned this fact, I was under an obligation to contact Aunt Klava’s relatives and try to return the apartment to them. But I put it out of my mind. My grandmother had discharged the debt when she housed Aunt Klava. At least, as far as such debts could be discharged.

  So I did not know what to say to my grandmother. She had lived a lie but she had done so alone and in silence, in order that no one else should have to live it as well. To me this was courageous. But that her conscience still worried her, that it was, maybe, part of what animated her and kept her alive—that was not something I should try to eliminate. Though at the same time it was OK for me to try.

  “You earned this apartment,” I said. “You earned it by working on that movie. And when Aunt Klava came back, you opened your door to her.”

  “Yes,” my grandmother reluctantly agreed.

  “Not a lot of people would have done that,” I ventured. People released from the camps often did not have permission to return to Moscow, and certainly not to move back into their old apartments. Aunt Klava was probably breaking the law by coming back, and my grandmother protected her.

  “That’s true,” said my grandmother. “Unfortunately,” she said with certainty, “that’s true.”

  Now she looked sad again, but only in her usual way.

  “You see, Andryushik,” she said, “all my friends have died. All my r
elatives have died. I am all alone.”

  “You’re not entirely alone,” I said.

  “No,” she insisted. “I am.”

  * * *

  • • •

  It was weird. After conversations like this, and at other times—while we were watching the nightly news together, or playing anagrams, or just sipping tea after lunch—I felt that she had accepted my presence there, however finite, as a real and solid thing. It was rarely something in particular that I did for her that she appreciated; it was just my showing up. When I would get dressed to go to the Coffee Grind, or out for some groceries, she never failed to express admiration. “Andryush, I’m so impressed with you,” she’d say. “You are so tall.”

  I was and am barely five foot seven. But my grandmother was now so tiny, I must have looked tall to her. Or so she said.

  One day I went out to the so-called market and bought a bunch of groceries; since you had to pay for a plastic bag I always brought my Labyrinth bookstore tote bag with me, and on this occasion I had filled it to the brim with clementines, potatoes, sushki, and my grandmother’s favorite poppy-seed pie. While doing the shopping I had developed an overwhelming need to pee, so I set the tote bag down when I came home, shuffled off my sneakers, and ran to the toilet. When I eventually emerged I saw my grandmother pulling on the handle of the tote with all her might and slowly, slowly dragging it along the floor toward the kitchen. It was an incredible sight. She was an indomitable person. I intercepted her and picked up the bag.

  “Are you able to carry all that?” she asked, in awe.

  But just as often she could reveal a profound distrust of me. Two incidents stand out. The first took place during a rare visit from Emma Abramovna. She apparently felt bad about my grandmother’s aborted attempt to visit her, and also her son Arkady was staying with her for a few days while his wife and daughter were out of town, so she had access to a car, and she decided to come visit us. My grandmother was thrilled and made elaborate preparations, including sitting down with me and asking very seriously whether I thought the old bottle of wine in the fridge was still good enough to drink, and if not, what I thought we should replace it with. I suggested a bottle of Abkhazian white and went out and got it. The day of the visit, my grandmother put out the plates and silverware and her best napkins early in the morning and we ate breakfast at the table in the back room, so as not to disturb them.

  Finally lunchtime arrived and with it Emma Abramovna and Arkady. Arkady was in his early fifties, a quiet computer programmer; he spent much of the visit looking at his phone. In any case, the visit was about my grandmother and Emma Abramovna. It went, as the visits between them usually went, with a discussion of Emma Abramovna’s children (wonderful!) and my grandmother’s grandchildren (neglectful, except for me), their mutual acquaintances (mostly in Israel), and the lousy cold weather. Arkady and I occasionally tried to introduce fresh topics of conversation, with limited success. And then my grandmother—I could practically see this happening—fell into her usual post-lunch funk. “Yes,” she said, “yes,” and then, before I could stop her, “you see, the thing is, everyone has died. Everyone I know has died. All my relatives, all my friends. They died and left me all alone.”

  “Come on, Seva,” said Emma Abramovna.

  “But it’s true!” my grandmother insisted.

  “I’m still alive,” Emma Abramovna said, taking the bait.

  “Yes, you, it’s true. But who else?”

  “How should I know?!” Emma Abramovna cried. “I’m sure there are other people alive besides me!”

  “Yes,” said my grandmother sadly. “Maybe.” And with that, her melancholy filled the room.

  After Arkady took Emma Abramovna home, I couldn’t help myself.

  “Grandma,” I said. “You so value Emma Abramovna’s friendship. You were so worried whether she’d have a good time. And then she’s here and all you talk about is how lonely you are and how depressed you are.”

  “So?” said my grandmother, looking up at me (I was turning around from doing the dishes, and she was relaxing at the kitchen table—social activity always took the wind out of her). “It’s true, isn’t it?”

  “That’s not the point! People don’t want to hear how depressed you are!”

  “You don’t need to yell,” she said. Then she stood up, placed her mug of tea in the sink, and left the kitchen. I hadn’t been yelling, I didn’t think. But I hadn’t not been yelling either. I watched her walk to her bedroom and close the door behind her. Why I thought I could change my grandmother’s behavior by criticizing it I don’t know. What a jerk I was. I went back to doing the dishes.

  The other incident occurred about a week later, when my grandmother announced that she was going to attend her annual physical. How annual it was I had no idea, but I was eager to come along. My grandmother complained of many ailments, but none of them ever seemed to stop her from doing anything, and at the same time she kept going to the pharmacy and bringing home medicines to treat them. So I was looking forward to running her list of medicines past a doctor to see if they seemed about right.

  I was not disappointed. The doctor was a nice woman in her fifties with her brown hair tied in a bun; she spoke seriously with my grandmother, listened to her breathing and her heart, and generally gave her a clean bill of health. Then she looked at my grandmother’s list and said to me, “Are you out of your mind?”

  “What?”

  “Who made this list? Did you make it?”

  “She goes to the pharmacy and comes back with these.”

  “But half of them are counteractive. Look here, this is a medicine for low blood pressure, and this one is for high blood pressure. She shouldn’t be taking both at once!”

  My grandmother had apparently been self-medicating, with the help of the local pharmacist.

  “What should she take then?”

  The doctor went through the fifteen medicines and crossed out ten. “These are fine,” she said. “And no more additions unless they’re prescribed by an actual doctor.”

  I agreed with this approach, and when we got home I threw out all the medicines the doctor had crossed out. My grandmother’s faith in the doctor was total—she had brought a box of chocolates with her as a gift, and had laughed at all the doctor’s jokes and been immensely grateful for the fifteen minutes of attention she received—so I did not anticipate any problems, nor did I even really think she’d notice. But she noticed right away. “What happened to my medicines?” she said after supper.

  “The doctor told us to cut down on the medicines you take,” I said. “Here’s the new list.”

  “But what happened to the other ones?” she said.

  “I threw them out.”

  “Why?!”

  “So you wouldn’t take them by accident! They weren’t good for you!”

  My grandmother put her head in her hands. “How could you do this to me?” she said. “I needed those medicines.” Then: “You don’t want me to get better, do you?”

  “What?”

  “You want me to be sick.”

  “That’s not true!”

  “Fine,” she said. “I’ll be sick.” She pursed her lips and, once again, left the kitchen.

  I was upset, though this time, at least, I was in the right. And by the next day this whole conversation was forgotten; my grandmother occasionally asked who had crossed out all the medicines on her list, and I told her it was the doctor, and she accepted this. From there on out I tried to make sure she didn’t introduce any new medicines on her own. But this incident stuck with me—that she could turn on me so suddenly, with such conviction, was not good. And in the months ahead it would get worse.

  3.

  I ATTEND A DINNER PARTY

  IN A FLURRY of final blog posts on Russian literature—some of them pretty good—my first full PMOOC semester came to an end.
I read them over and made individual comments, and by the time the second week of December rolled around I was done.

  I had imagined that I’d be back home by now, but as it was I couldn’t afford to fly back and there wasn’t much reason to. My father and his family were going skiing, I no longer had a place to stay in New York, and no one had invited me to any of the holiday Slavic conferences. So I stuck around. I went back to some of the skates I’d been skipping, and played anagrams with my grandmother.

  As I was finishing up the semester, I was rewarded, in a way, by a dinner invitation from a postdoc I knew named Simon. He was in Moscow for the year working on his long-standing project about Czech–Russian cultural relations, and he was having a party, he wrote, in honor of the visit to town of the delightful Alex Fishman. He actually said that—“delightful.” Fishman was coming to town over break and Simon was throwing him a dinner party.

  Since I’d arrived I had avoided Simon and the rest of the expat academics. They were all in Russia for a reason, with specific goals and projects, whereas I was doing who knows what and living with my grandmother. It wasn’t really a conversation I felt like having. This dinner party, however, was a different matter. Whatever else it was, Moscow was my town. I was born here. Fishman didn’t get to show up for a visit without having to deal with me. Also, I had to admit, I was lonely.

  The evening did not go as planned. My first mistake was arriving an hour late. This was my grandmother’s fault. I had spent the day writing the last “narrative” evaluations of my many students. This was one of the perks of the PMOOC, as opposed to a regular old MOOC that you didn’t have to pay for; in addition to a grade, you got a narrative evaluation! When I finally got up to go, my grandmother blocked the way and asked if I would play anagrams with her. “We already played today,” I said. This was true. We’d played after lunch.