A Terrible Country

by Keith Gessen

  Kasha was easier than kotlety. You take a cup of kasha, pour it into a small pot. Pour cold water over this, to let the dust and kasha bits burned during the roasting process rise to the surface; drain the water; rinse once more; then pour twice as much boiling water on this as you have kasha. (This first time and several times after, I showed it to my grandmother, who eyeballed the level: good.) Place on a burner and bring to a boil (about three minutes); now mix in butter and salt and lower to a simmer; cover. In fifteen to twenty minutes, you have perfect kasha.

  To watch this happen—to be the vessel through which kasha is brought into the world, after a lifetime of eating it—how to describe this feeling? Tolstoy had eaten kasha; Chekhov had eaten kasha. With the power of kasha in my hands, I needed to rely on no one ever again. I still make kasha just about every day.

  But that was my one success. The kotlety fell apart, as I’ve said, and my grandmother’s simple potato soup recipe—potatoes, some water, some onions, some milk—ended up too watery. (And yet, to be fair: I made soup.) We ate the food quietly. Before we sat down, after I had finished cleaning all traces of flour from the kitchen, I looked up at the clock. It was a few minutes past four. I had started the grocery shopping at nine in the morning. In its entirety the process had taken seven hours; these flaky kotlety and the watery soup would last us three days, more realistically two if I came home hungry after hockey. Then I’d be off to the grocery store again.

  My grandmother ate the lunch with some gusto. “I need to get my strength back,” she said. “The only way to do that is to eat more.” I hadn’t seen her so cheerful in a long time. But soon a shade of worry once again crossed her face.

  “Andryush,” she said. “This will last us two days. Then what will we do?”

  That evening I looked up an old email from Dima to find the number of a woman named Seraphima Mikhailovna—she used to come clean and cook for him when he was in between wives. Seraphima Mikhailovna agreed to come by the day after tomorrow. She turned out to be a gregarious former math teacher from Ukraine, whose town had stopped paying salaries to schoolteachers years earlier, and she cooked a terrific batch of kotlety and mashed potatoes and borscht that would last until she came again three days later. Her kotlety were good, and her borscht was even better. She charged five hundred rubles per visit, or sixteen dollars, plus supplies, which she picked up herself. It was a good deal. Initially my grandmother found it a little trying, having this relative stranger in the house doing what she used to do and having, my grandmother felt, to supervise her. “Oy, it’s exhausting,” she said. “To cook and clean yourself is intolerable. But to have someone else do it is exhausting!” Still, she grew used to it. And as long as Seraphima Mikhailovna came to cook and clean, my grandmother never asked where our next meal was coming from. It was in the fridge. It was taken care of. That was the end of my experiment in good housekeeping. Aside from making kasha, I still haven’t learned how to cook.

  10.

  SHIPALKIN FOILS MY PLANS

  BY THIS POINT two weeks had passed since Sergei’s party. It’s not that I thought Yulia would forget me, exactly. But I did worry that whatever spell had been woven or whatever illusion she was laboring under so that she would kiss me at a party would be broken if any more time passed. And then it was broken. On Friday morning, the first day after the advent of Seraphima Mikhailovna, I texted Yulia asking if she wanted to hang out the next day, a Saturday. I suggested, since it was so cold, that we could go to the Tretyakov museum.

  Yulia did not text back right away and I opened my laptop on the windowsill to check my email. The first thing I saw was a message to the October list from Misha with the subject line “Urgent.” I opened it. “Guys,” read the email, “last night our old comrade Petya Shipalkin was arrested during an action against the FSB. I know we’ve had our differences with him but none of that matters now. He’s being held at the precinct on Sretenka—if you’re able, let’s meet there at noon and show our support. There will no doubt be some Mayhem people there—let’s try to stay out of debates for now and just show our solidarity.”

  The uncharacteristically somber email from Misha went on to describe logistics and share phone numbers. I wrote them down on a notepad but the entire time I was thinking: Shipalkin. Fucking Shipalkin. This was why Yulia hadn’t texted me back. If she had—if she had texted me to say this had happened—that would be one thing. But she had not.

  I worked distractedly for a couple of hours, saw that my grandmother was resting after a hearty late breakfast, and then put on three sweaters and my Gulag coat and headed out into the cold. “Civil activist Pyotr Shipalkin,” I heard on Echo of Moscow radio as I was putting on my things, “was arrested last night in front of Lubyanka as he staged a protest against political violence.” Already, he was being turned into a hero.

  I arrived at our police station just after noon. There was a surprisingly large crowd, maybe fifty people, milling about outside. It looked to be broken up into three distinct groups. One was Sergei, Misha, Boris, and the rest (though not Yulia yet), in their cheap, puffy winter coats and old hats. My people. Then there was a small group of more arty-looking types, some of them in leather jackets and even leather pants, all of them stylish and in black. That must have been Mayhem. And then there was an even larger group of better-dressed people, among whom I recognized one of Dima’s friends from the night of Maxim’s birthday party, and then, holding a microphone and interviewing someone, Elena from Echo of Moscow.

  She noticed me and came over. “What are you doing here?” she asked.

  “I live near here,” I said. “What about you?”

  She lifted up her microphone to indicate that she was working. “Do you know this guy?” she asked.

  “Not really,” I said.

  “Hmm,” said Elena, losing interest in me and scanning the crowd for likely interview subjects.

  “I think that’s his crew,” I said, nodding to the Mayhem crowd.

  “Oh?” said Elena. “Thank you.” And she went off toward them.

  I didn’t mind. Elena’s spell had been broken, definitively, by Yulia. And for a moment I allowed myself to wonder if Yulia’s absence from this quasi-protest meant that she was having a different reaction to Shipalkin’s arrest than I had anticipated. Maybe she still thought Shipalkin was an idiot; maybe she thought it was nobler to visit one’s grandmother in the hospital than to pull stunts in front of the KGB. But then Misha told me that she was inside the building, with Shipalkin’s lawyer. I knew then that we weren’t going to be seeing each other again anytime soon. She had been trying to forget about Shipalkin and now he had made that impossible.

  As Misha now told it, a drunk Shipalkin had achieved this coup by showing up the night before on Lubyanka with a canister of tomato sauce. He started flinging the sauce at the big FSB building with his hand, yelling, “Hands in sauce, hands off!” To the surprise of the Mayhem colleagues who had been observing his “action,” no one came out of the Lubyanka building to confront him; instead, a few minutes in, a police car pulled up and the officers tackled him. He had spent the night at the station. What happened next would depend on whether they believed he was primarily part of a political movement or primarily drunk. Drunk would be a lot better, in terms of getting out.

  The whole thing was so stupid, I thought. Here was a regime that had systematically undermined workers’ rights; had prosecuted several nasty wars, most recently with Georgia; and had imprisoned labor activists and dissidents, and encouraged the far right. And Shipalkin was going to defeat it by throwing tomato sauce at the FSB? What a joke. Boris—and Yulia—were right.

  Finally Yulia came out, with the lawyer, and went over to where Misha and I and the other October people were standing. She hugged all of us without distinction; she looked like she’d been crying. I didn’t know what to do or say.

  Now the lawyer asked people to pay attention, and the three
groups pulled up together to listen. He said Shipalkin was being charged with political extremism. “We’re trying to talk them down but it could be serious,” he said. “I would urge you, if possible, to be careful what you say in the next few days and weeks online and to the media. If you want Petya to be free soon, you won’t try to turn him into a political martyr.”

  “What kind of martyr?” I heard myself say. “What if we say that he’s a fool with zero political analysis or sense?”

  The lawyer studied me for a moment. “Well, actually, from a legal perspective, that would be fine,” he said.

  But my remark had caused a commotion. “Who’s this asshole?” one of the Mayhem guys said from behind me, loudly enough so I could hear.

  I began to turn around, to introduce myself, but at this moment a young police officer came out of the building. “I’m sorry,” he said politely. “You can’t all stand here. We’ll have to consider it an unsanctioned public meeting.”

  “We’re leaving now,” said the lawyer. “Right, guys?”

  The three groups, October and Mayhem and the liberals, which had come together to listen to the lawyer’s report, now caucused separately and briefly on this question and decided to depart. “We could go to the Coffee Grind,” someone proposed.

  “That’s expensive,” one of the Mayhem people said.

  “They don’t have waiters,” said Misha. “We can order one cappuccino for all of us and that’ll be enough.” The proposal was accepted. A few people gave me dirty looks before heading in the Grind’s direction, but that was it.

  Without saying anything to me, Yulia headed after them.

  “Hey,” I said, catching up with her. “I’m going to go back and check on my grandmother.”

  “All right,” she said. She kept her gaze on the ground as she said this.

  “Can I see you soon?” I asked.

  She looked up at me now, and I saw she was angry. “Why did you say that about Petya?” she said.

  Fairly or unfairly, I got mad again. “Anarchism is an infantile disorder!” I cried. “You used to think so too.”

  Yulia looked me square in the face. “First of all,” she said, “please don’t tell me what I did or did not used to think. Second, how dare you? Whatever you and maybe I think of Petya’s politics, right now he’s in there and we’re out here. And what’s more, before too long you’ll be over there.” She pointed over her shoulder, toward America. “It’s indecent to criticize someone whose position you’ll never have to occupy,” she said.

  I felt exposed. One month ago I’d had no idea that anarchism was an infantile disorder. Now I was proclaiming it to the world. And though I might claim to myself and to Dima and to my grandmother that I was staying, I also knew that eventually I would leave. I didn’t say anything.

  “Well?” said Yulia, giving me an opportunity to respond. “Fine,” she said. “I’ll see you at study group.”

  And that was that. She headed for the Coffee Grind. I turned around and ran into Elena. She was looking at me like she’d discovered something about me. “That was an interesting statement about the protester,” she said. “Do you want to say it on air?”

  I had, by this point, lost all interest in Elena. “No,” I said, “I don’t.” And I headed home.

  The next week, for some reason, the Marxist study group was moved to Wednesday, meaning that it conflicted with hockey. I called Sergei to see what he thought. “I think we play hockey,” said Sergei. “Marx isn’t going anywhere.” I agreed. As a result I didn’t see Yulia again until the week after, almost two weeks after Shipalkin’s arrest. Shipalkin was still in jail, now in Lefortovo, the special FSB prison. Part of the discussion that evening was about what could be done for him. Yulia had visited him in prison—she was able to, as they were still legally married. She said he seemed scared and upset. Our walk along Tverskaya with Boris and Nikolai was awkward; Yulia and I behaved as total strangers. How could we not? Lefortovo was serious—it’s where they put terrorists and major criminals and fallen oligarchs and other people they planned to send away for a long time. Another activist who’d been arrested for defacing a government building—he’d drawn a picture of Medvedev fellating Putin on a police station in Novosibirsk—had recently received a three-year sentence. Would Yulia be forced to wait that long? It wasn’t impossible. She looked unhappy, and there was nothing I could do.

  11.

  TO CHEER OURSELVES UP, WE GO SHOPPING

  I HAD FINALLY found someone, and not just anyone, but Yulia, and then I had lost her. Russia had taken her. My grandmother was right.

  I redoubled my efforts to advance myself for the Watson position. I wrote to my recommenders, updating them on my Russian activities so they could incorporate that into any follow-ups they felt like sending to the search committee, and I read up on old Marxist groupuscules, the better to compare October to them. If I submitted my article to one of the Russia journals soon, there might be time for it to get accepted before Watson made their decision. They had a late start, and probably wouldn’t be done before May.

  My grandmother was getting better and worse simultaneously. Her strength was coming back. She shuffled around the apartment almost like before; she was eating normally. But with the return of her strength came the return of her depression—as if, having conquered most of her physical difficulties, she could go back to worrying about her spiritual ones. She began talking regularly about suicide. “You know,” she said one day after lunch, “I’ve had enough.”

  I knew from the way she said it what she meant, but I decided it might be therapeutic for her to say it. “Enough of what?” I said.

  “Of all this,” she said. “Of life. I’ve had my share.”

  “Well,” I said. I didn’t know what to say. “You’re just going to have to tolerate it a little longer.”

  “Yes,” my grandmother said. “I guess I’ll have to.”

  I tried my best. One day when it wasn’t too cold out I took her to the department store across from the Clean Ponds metro. Despite going down to only three PMOOC classes, I had managed to save a little money by cutting down on hockey and boycotting the Coffee Grind, and I thought it might be nice to buy her a new pink sweater, since the one she had was frayed and had developed a noticeable hole in the right shoulder. The outing was not a success. As we shuffled toward the department store my grandmother started reminiscing about Soviet shopping. “It was impossible to find anything,” she said, “but if you did find it, you could buy it. Everything was affordable. Of course, it didn’t matter, because you couldn’t find it. Most of my clothes came from America.”

  “What do you mean, from America?”

  “Someone sent them to me from America.”

  “My mom?” I asked. “Your daughter?”

  “My daughter?”

  “You had a daughter in America.”

  “Yelochka?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes, it must have been her. She died, you know.”

  We walked on in silence. The store, aside from a hulking security guard at the entrance, was empty. People were still suffering the effects of the crisis. And this store was not cheap. It was not crazy, like the luxury stores closer to the Kremlin, but it was definitely overpriced. I knew this going in. But I had not anticipated—though I should have—the effect this would have on my grandmother. When I walked her over to the sweaters and found a pink one I thought she might like, she immediately reached for the price tag. It was 5,000 rubles—$160. “Oh, my God!” she cried, and dropped the price tag as if she’d been singed.

  I found myself having an interesting reaction. I had myself been this person complaining about prices so many times, in so many stores, restaurants, coffee shops—everywhere. Especially in Russia, where some of the prices were very reasonable, in line with the salaries people made, and some of the prices were so outrageous, more in line
with the massive theft at the top of the pyramid, that it was impossible not to complain. I mean, my grandmother was right. This was a thirty-dollar sweater. But my interesting reaction consisted in taking the side of the store. “That’s how much a sweater costs!” I said. “It’s a nice sweater.”

  “No, thank you,” said my grandmother.

  “Will you at least try it on?”

  “What’s the point?”

  There must be a clearance section, I thought. I should have scouted ahead and taken my grandmother there right away. Stupid.

  “Hold on,” I said. “I’m going to find some cheaper sweaters. I’ll be right back.”

  My grandmother had by now wandered over to the lingerie section and was picking up skimpy little underpants—they really did have very little fabric on them—and looking at the price tags and laughing in horror. “Three thousand rubles!” she called out after me, holding up a tiny blue thong.

  I left her to this and started speedwalking through the store. There were overpriced winter coats from Sweden, overpriced winter hats from Norway, some jeans that were actually not so terribly priced, or anyway no more than jeans are normally overpriced, but all of them had some kind of sparkly spangles on them. Why was everything so overpriced? It wasn’t because people along the labor chain were receiving fair wages—they were not. I knew from talking with Michael the subletter, who worked in logistics, that Russia’s roads were bad, the train system was good but overcrowded, and customs duties were inordinately high. Moscow was well inland, so even under the best of circumstances it was going to be a difficult place to deliver goods to. And one of the most corrupt economic systems on Earth was far from the best of circumstances. So in the end you had a flimsy pink cotton sweater that cost five thousand rubles. I completed my tour of the store. There was no clearance section.

  When I returned to the lingerie section my grandmother was no longer there. Nor was she back at the sweaters. Had something happened? I finally found her standing in front of the massive security guard.