A Terrible Country

by Keith Gessen

“We did?” said my grandmother. She looked, standing in the hallway in her pink robe, a pen and piece of scrap paper already in her hand, terribly disappointed. I couldn’t do it to her.

  “OK,” I said. “One quick game.”

  We ended up playing four games—as usual, a total slaughter—and then I was able to leave.

  By the time I arrived, people were already eating, and Fishman, I could tell, had already monopolized the conversation. I could hear him from the front hallway as I came in and took off my shoes and shook Simon’s hand. Simon’s apartment was in a compound owned by the Czech embassy, and it was recently refurbished and was on the twelfth floor, with a great view of Triumphal Square and the Mayakovsky monument. He escorted me to the kitchen so I could put the bagful of beers I’d brought—there was no such thing as a six-pack in Russia—into the fridge and take one for myself. (I noticed that someone else had brought a superior brand of beer, but it would be gauche at least at first not to drink the inferior Russian beer that I’d brought, so I took that.) “Listen,” said Simon quietly as I opened my beer, “are you and Alex cool?”

  I was surprised. I thought I had managed to keep my hatred of Fishman pretty much to myself. I resolved to continue doing so. “Sure,” I said. “Why?”

  Now I saw that it was Simon’s turn to be surprised. He apparently thought I knew something that I did not know. And he had inadvertently half revealed it to me.

  “Why?” I said again.

  Very reluctantly Simon said, “Because of Sarah?”

  “Sarah,” I repeated, nodding as if I knew what he meant. And then I did know. Of course. That’s who she was seeing; that’s who was taking all those photos. If I hadn’t mentally muted Fishman’s Facebook posts after his obnoxious photo of Princeton, I’d have figured it out sooner. “Well,” I said now. “That’s nice. For them.” I had no right to be angry—they were grown-ups, I was living in Moscow, and anyway Sarah had dumped me—and I did not want to ruin Simon’s party. He was a good guy, when you came down to it. But I followed him out into the dining room in a bit of a daze.

  There were about ten people sitting around a large rectangular glass table and drinking wine. The lights were dimmed and the furniture was modern (though, I suspect, Czech), and if you couldn’t see the Mayakovsky statue out the window you’d have thought you were in a condo in midtown Manhattan. I recognized half the people at the table from various conferences and lectures, as well as Fishman, of course, who had grown a hipster beard since last I saw him and now gave me a somewhat wary nod, before continuing to hold forth on his favorite topic, that is to say, Fishman himself. The one notable thing about Fishman on this occasion, aside from the fact that he was wearing a very expensive shirt, was the pretty girl sitting next to him. I didn’t catch everyone’s name as I was hurriedly introduced, but I caught hers—Yulia. By the way she dressed and said hello, I could tell she was Russian. How did she know Fishman?

  Simon had made a big vat of spaghetti and I was able to hide behind a mound of it as I tried to adjust, first, to the thought that Fishman was sleeping with Sarah, and next to being around people who were neither profanity-spewing Russian hockey players nor my grandmother. I had thought it would be annoying but—whenever Fishman stopped talking for a minute—I found to my surprise that it was not annoying. It was nice. The group was a mix of Russians and Americans, all of them grad students or post-docs. Some of the stuff they were working on was very interesting—one of the Russians was writing a biography of the controversial formalist critic Viktor Shklovsky. Another was studying the Marina Tsvetaeva archive at the NKVD. These were sweet, earnest people who had gone into academia because they cared about knowledge. The Americans among them brought news of the financial crisis: there was talk at some of the universities of doing away with Slavic departments altogether, merging them into the history or literature departments, and cutting staff—enrollment was already down, no one wanted to learn Russian anymore, and now money was tight. I felt a surge of warmth toward my fellow Slavicists. I spent so much time on Facebook being envious of their successes, their plum posts or brilliant futures, but they were good people! That they were now all stuck in a demeaning pursuit of professional advancement, and in a shrinking field to boot, was not their fault. They had gone into this with the purest motives. Even Fishman, maybe. Though maybe not.

  Why did this happen to people? All of us could have pursued more lucrative careers. There were people in our field who had left academia and prospered. Aaron Bloom had dropped out of our program after two years and gone to law school and was now an intellectual property attorney in Washington, D.C.; he was making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. Or Eugene Priglashovkin, an émigré like me and Fishman, who had thought one of his research topics—the post-Soviet existence of a former Gulag town in Siberia—was so interesting that he made a documentary about it. Now he was in Hollywood directing actual films. Reports of Priglashovkin’s new life in Los Angeles filled conversations in the Slavic department like rumors of another world. Priglashovkin was dating an actress. Priglashovkin went to a party at Leonardo DiCaprio’s! Fishman himself, actually, when I ran into him in the library the year before, had pulled me over to a computer and showed me Priglashovkin’s house on Zillow.com. It had been bought for $2.2 million. By Priglashovkin.

  And yet the people in this room had stuck it out! And I too had stuck it out! We might have been frustrated, thwarted, bitter, poor, but at least we still had the dream. The dream of scholarship, of teaching, of learning, of the advancement of human knowledge. Anyone who stayed in academia for this long was my brother, I thought to myself as I put another serving of spaghetti on my plate. Hell, even Fishman.

  But Fishman was resolved not to allow me these generous thoughts—not about him, not about anyone. He wouldn’t stop talking, and the more he talked, the more I felt like I was being pulled back into all the pettiness of academia, like Fishman was magically conjuring it by sheer force of will.

  “I mean,” he was saying now, “the thing to do is get an appointment in Slavic and then start your own ‘research center.’ Those things are the biggest scams going. But it makes the university feel like it’s engaging in contemporary debates.” My mother had worked at a research center. It was a precarious existence, but hardly a scam.

  Fishman! Sarah wasn’t my girlfriend anymore, obviously. But it was also the case that Fishman had a thing for other people’s girlfriends. It was something he talked about, back when we’d still been friends, during our first year in the department. During our second year this predilection caused everyone a lot of trouble: Fishman, at a party, made out with the drunk visiting girlfriend of a first-year student named Jake, who was from Wisconsin. This was one of the nice things about Slavic grad school—people came from all over the place, it wasn’t just the children of Russian immigrants. And I don’t know how someone not from Wisconsin would have handled it, but Jake, who was a head taller than Fishman, grabbed him by the collar without saying a word and flung him down on the floor and left the party, with his remorseful and now slightly less drunk girlfriend trailing behind. All this would have been unfortunate and upsetting, but still within the bounds of the sort of stuff that happens at grad school, had Fishman not then complained to the department about the “physical assault,” saying that he now felt “unsafe” at school with poor Jake. My adviser was then head of the department, and he tried his best to talk Fishman into dropping the whole thing. “As long as you stay out of people’s relationships,” my adviser said to him, “you’ll be perfectly safe.” But Fishman was adamant—it was a matter of principle, he said—and took his case to the university disciplinary board. As a result, Jake was kicked out of school for a year, and my adviser was officially rebuked by the university for not responding more promptly to a student’s concerns about his physical safety. My adviser took the whole thing philosophically—“I’ll tell you what creates an unsafe environment—that rat Fishman!”�
��and at the end of the year resigned from his position as department head, which in a way he was all too happy to have the excuse to do. But Jake did not return after his enforced sabbatical. I was still friends with him on Facebook, but he didn’t post there very often.

  So that was Fishman. Ever since the Jake incident I kept waiting for him to be punished, to get his comeuppance from the just and vengeful God of Slavic Studies, but it just never seemed to happen. There were a few jobs that he didn’t get, to be sure, because at the end of the day you could only snow so many people with your fashionable work on digitizing the Gulag, but he always seemed to land on his feet. He had finished his dissertation a year before I did and gone on a Fulbright to Moscow; then he’d started his post-doc at Princeton. He was luxuriating in it now. “It’s such a supportive atmosphere,” he was saying. “Whether you’re new faculty or old faculty, it’s all the same—a very collegial place.”

  I listened to Fishman but stole as many glances as were not obviously inappropriate at the girl next to him. Was it possible that in addition to Sarah, Fishman was also seeing her? For the first few minutes of dinner I tried to convince myself that she wasn’t as cute as she seemed. Was she a little too thin, maybe? And her teeth were crooked! But it didn’t work. She was cute. She had short black hair and big green eyes and thin shoulders and she held herself very erect, like a Soviet icon. And she was self-conscious about her teeth, so when she laughed at a joke, for example by Fishman, she ducked her head a little so that her teeth weren’t showing. It was an endearing gesture. She was clearly connected to Fishman somehow, but how? If Fishman was sleeping with this girl, was I obligated to tell Sarah? No, I would not tell Sarah. But Jesus! Fishman turned to her several times during dinner to say something too quietly for others to hear, and once he even put his hand on her arm. Fishman was always putting his hands on people in a conspiratorial manner. What an asshole.

  “Princeton, Princeton, Princeton,” said Fishman, to a group of people who would have been willing to gnaw off their left arms if, by reducing themselves in mass, it would enable them to squeeze through that university’s heavy oak doors. I kept waiting for one of them to rebel, to throw off the shackles of Fishman: who did he think he was, talking to them like this? Instead, these sweet Russian and American grad students and post-docs lapped it up. One of them asked, of a famous Bakhtin scholar, “What’s Caryl Emerson like?”

  “Oh,” said Fishman, “very collegial. I was just the other day telling her about my new project—she was very supportive. You know, she’s really very down to earth.”

  He said it as if the rest of us thought that Caryl Emerson got around everywhere in a helicopter. Which, in fact, we sort of did.

  His latest project, Fishman went on, was a scheme to put something or other from the Lenin Library on the internet. In fact Fishman was in town this week to negotiate with the library for digital rights, though they were being stubborn. “They said, ‘Why look at the internet when you can visit the library?’” Most people around the table laughed; Yulia, sitting next to Fishman, did not. Did she hate the internet, love libraries? I loved libraries too! “They’re still using a card catalog,” continued Fishman. “At a certain point you have to interpret this as being an act of hostility toward knowledge.” People nodded. I finished gulping down my beer and retreated to the kitchen for another.

  Goddamn Fishman. This was a guy who’d once asked me what the big deal about Lotman was. “He’s just a second-rate Barthes, don’t you think?” No, I didn’t think. Fishman was an idiot.

  I decided to start drinking the better beer—a Czech Budweiser, which I had never seen in a can before—and took one out of the fridge and popped it open. Yum—thick and a little sweet, just as I remembered it. I considered bringing a whole bunch with me to the table, but Simon had set up everything so nicely that I didn’t want to spoil the view with a mountain of beer cans. At the same time I didn’t want to keep sneaking off into the kitchen to fetch beers. I was wearing a blue cardigan with side pockets, pretty deep pockets actually, and I stuck one of the Budweisers into my left pocket. It protruded a little bit, but that was OK; no one was really paying attention to me anyway.

  Fishman wasn’t just an idiot; he was a dangerous idiot. His parents had come from the Soviet Union, as mine had, and at around the same time. Like many of us, he’d grown up speaking Russian, and like many of us he’d inherited his parents’ ambivalence toward the country they’d escaped. Our parents had been so skeptical of Russia, so fearful of the Russians, that they had uprooted their lives, put everything in boxes, and gone to the post office dozens of times to ship their books to America, just so they could get away. But they had also remained bound to Russia by a million ties of memory and habit and affection. They watched Russian movies, shopped at Russian stores, and preferred Russian candy. My father, back in Massachusetts with his American wife and non-Russian-speaking children, now downloaded new Russian TV shows from the internet and watched them for hours as he rode his stationary bike. Whereas we, the children of these émigrés . . . if we were involved in Russia, we were critical of Russia and Russians, somewhat as our parents had been, but also, somehow, not. We did not maintain the same bonds; we did not experience the same attachment. I sometimes remembered Gershom Scholem’s accusation against Hannah Arendt during the furor over Eichmann in Jerusalem, a book that was deeply critical both of Israel and of the many Jews who had, according to Arendt, been too accommodating to those who wished to exterminate them. Arendt’s book was learned and acute, Scholem said. But it lacked ahavat Israel—“a love of Israel,” a love for her people. The accusation may have been unfair toward Arendt, but I think it was fair to us, to the children of the émigrés. In everything they did, even in the very ferocity of their rejection of Russia, our parents had held on to a love of Russia. Their children had not.

  Something about Fishman making fun of the Lenin Library really irked me. Or maybe it was this beautiful girl sitting next to him that irked me. And of course there was the not irrelevant matter of his sleeping with my ex-girlfriend. And maybe too, on top of all that, there was my frustration at this beautiful apartment that Simon lived in all by himself, and at Simon’s wonderful career prospects studying Russian-Czech cultural exchange, becoming himself an avatar of cultural exchange—a speaker of both Russian and Czech who lived in a Czech apartment in Moscow, while I lived with my grandmother, in a room still partly filled with Dima’s boxes, and no one even responded to the résumés and cover letters I sent anymore, and I no longer expected them to.

  Anyway, I returned to the table with my beers. Fishman was now expatiating on his theory of Putin’s Russia. “I was just saying to my colleague Richard Sutherland that really the pedagogy around Russia should be focused around totalitarianism. We need to understand totalitarianism. Because the Putin regime is just totalitarianism in a postmodern guise. He’s turning the whole country into a Gulag.”

  Ahh, people said. That’s so true.

  I couldn’t take it anymore.

  “Fishman,” I said, before I could decide not to, “do you even listen to yourself?”

  “What?” said Fishman. He looked at me like he’d forgotten I was there.

  “‘The people at the Leninka are barbarians. I’m at Princeton. Putin is totalitarian.’ Do you listen to yourself?”

  “As much as anyone else does,” said Fishman, looking directly at me. “I’m my own worst critic, in fact.” He was being very cool, whereas I was practically hyperventilating. “But tell me, what is the matter with what I’ve said?”

  “You run down Russia so much! You complain about it and make jokes about it all the time. And yet you also profit from it. It’s your job to study Russia and yet you seem to have nothing but contempt for it.”

  “Criticism is not the same as contempt. Criticism is part of a dialogue.”

  At this point I could still have backed off. I could have let it go. But I had lost
my temper. “WHAT HAVE YOU DONE FOR RUSSIA?!” I yelled. I don’t know exactly what I meant by this, but what my statement lacked in clarity it made up for in volume. “What have you ever done for Russia, Fishman?”

  Fishman looked like he thought I might jump across the table and grab him by the throat. It wouldn’t have been the first time Fishman was physically assaulted by someone in our department. I looked down at my hands. They were gripping the edge of the table—including my left hand, which until now had been holding on to the beer in my pocket to make sure it didn’t fall out.

  “I’m not a social worker, if that’s what you mean,” Fishman said, regaining his cool. “But I like to think that people aware of my criticism find it tonic. But tell me, what have you done for Russia?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. It was a fair question. “Maybe nothing. But I would like to.”

  “Terrific,” said Fishman. “Good luck.”

  There was a moment of silence. I looked around the table to see where people were at; I half hoped to find everyone staring at Fishman with the disgust that he deserved. They were not. In fact some people were staring at me instead. Yulia was looking at me with what I can only describe as an inscrutable expression, and others were staring at their plates in embarrassment. But their embarrassment, I couldn’t help but notice, was not for Fishman. It was for me—a guy who couldn’t get a job and came to dinner parties and yelled with little or no provocation at former classmates who had become more successful than he was. And it was hard to disagree with them. I was embarrassed for me too.

  I got up to leave. As I did so the Budweiser can finally tipped out of my pocket and onto the floor. We all watched it roll toward the wall and then come to a stop. For a moment I considered pretending that it wasn’t mine, but this was impossible. Fishman was laughing. “Why do you have a beer in your pocket, Kaplan?”

  I ignored Fishman’s question. With what dignity I could muster, I bent over and picked up the can. “Russia is sick,” I said, straightening up again. “When someone is sick, they do not need criticism. They need help.”