A Terrible Country

by Keith Gessen

  “Tell me,” she was saying, “do a lot of people come to this store? It’s very expensive.”

  The giant shrugged. How was he to know? All he knew was that if someone tried to steal something, he would fuck them up.

  “Well.” My grandmother wouldn’t let up. “It doesn’t seem like there are a lot of people, does it?” She gestured to the empty store.

  The giant’s countenance changed and for a second I thought I even saw him square up slightly to my tiny grandmother. Maybe she was trying to steal something, and should get fucked up? Stranger things had happened in this country.

  I took my grandmother firmly by the elbow. “Shall we go?” I said.

  “All right,” said my grandmother.

  We walked home. For the next two weeks, whenever my grandmother called Emma Abramovna, she made sure to complain about the prices in the store. At first this hurt my feelings—I felt like she was complaining about me—but then I realized that it had given her something to talk about. She continued to wear her sweater with the hole in it. It was just a little hole. It was fine.

  * * *

  • • •

  Emma Abramovna told us about a Tsvetaeva documentary she’d read about. Had we seen it? We hadn’t. “We never go to the movies anymore,” my grandmother lamented. “Andrei’s too busy.”

  “I am not!” I said. It was true I’d been spending a lot of time with Sergei, following him around as he did his volunteer teaching, but I still had most of my evenings free, and anyway that wasn’t the reason we weren’t going to the movies. I said, “You don’t like any of the movies we see.”

  “I would like this one,” said my grandmother.

  “Great!” I said. “Let’s see it.”

  So on a non-hockey night a few days later, we dressed warmly and headed out into the night. Once on the boulevard, my grandmother started waving at cars. Mercedes after Audi after Mercedes sped past without paying her any mind. “That car won’t pick you up,” I kept saying. My poor grandmother would ignore me, wander out into the street, and come back a few seconds later disappointed.

  “How did you know?” she’d say.

  “Because it’s a Mercedes.”

  Then I saw an old Zhiguli lumbering toward us. “Whereas that car,” I now said, and stuck out my hand, “will pick us up.” And sure enough the old wreck pulled over and the driver asked where we were going. My grandmother looked at me like I had magical powers of foresight. Then we sat in traffic for twenty minutes. The boulevard wasn’t really built for cars, and yet cars had no choice but to use it. It would have been faster to walk to the theater, though this way at least we were sitting down. My grandmother, sitting up front, spent most of the ride talking about how old she was and how all of her friends had died. The driver nodded politely and occasionally made a sympathetic sound. When we finally arrived my grandmother handed him fifty rubles, which was too little. Luckily I had anticipated this possibility, and was able to hand him fifty more.

  We came into the theater after the lights had gone down; my grandmother clung to me as we maneuvered ourselves to a pair of seats in the front row. This way she could stretch out her legs. And finally we were there. The movie unspooled before us: it showed Tsvetaeva’s life before the Revolution, a happy life among the Moscow intelligentsia, her father the professor and founder of the art collection that became the Pushkin Museum. The Tsvetaevs lived in comfort, they had servants, but they were not aristocrats or parasites; they were the very best of the world that the Revolution would destroy. The documentary had good archival footage. A lot of it took place near where we were sitting—Tsvetaeva grew up around the corner, practically, at Three Pond Lane.

  “Andryush,” my grandmother said very loudly, turning to me. “Did we get tickets?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you sure?”

  I assured her we had tickets.

  “Excuse me!” someone said, meaning, please be quiet.

  Tsvetaeva had her first success with her poetry at a young age and embarked on her first love affairs, with her eventual husband, Sergei Efron, and also the poetess Sophia Parnok. Then the Bolsheviks came to power. Tsvetaeva was soon cut off from Efron, who was fighting the Bolsheviks in Crimea, while she remained in Moscow with their two young daughters.

  “Andryush,” my grandmother said, “I need to use the bathroom.”

  I took her hand and led her out of the hall. Once we were close enough I let her go. She looked awkward, in a hurry, as she went into the ladies’ room. I waited for her in the cinema’s empty, tastelessly furnished café. She took a while, and then emerged, my poor grandmother, looking very tired.

  We had missed the Civil War, the terrible death of Tsvetaeva’s daughter from hunger, and then her emigration, finally, to Prague, to join her husband, who had escaped there from the Bolsheviks.

  Tsvetaeva lived happily in Prague and gave birth to a son; then she lived unhappily in Paris, wrote some of the greatest Russian poetry of the twentieth century, and tried to make ends meet. All through this her husband did nothing. Or, not nothing: He went to school. He went to school a lot. In Prague, at the age of thirty, Efron enrolled in university and started a student literary magazine. A few years later, once they’d moved to Paris, Efron again enrolled in university, this time to study filmmaking. I started to feel like the movie was some kind of criticism of me.

  It was only in 1934, at the age of forty-two, that Sergei Efron finally got a job—and that job was for the NKVD. At first all he had to do was praise the USSR to the deeply anti-Soviet émigré community in Paris, which Efron, who’d recently been converted to Soviet Communism, could manage with a clear conscience. But eventually the job came to include political assassinations. This is what happens when you work for the NKVD. Efron helped organize the killings of the defected Soviet agent Nathan Poretsky and (possibly) Leon Trotsky’s son Lev Sedov. Efron did a so-so job, and with the police on his trail, fled for Moscow. He was soon followed there by the couple’s daughter, Ariadna, who worshipped him.

  Here my grandmother had to go to the bathroom again. I hung out in the doorway of the theater until she came back, watching the movie and watching for her.

  Tsvetaeva was now alone in Paris with her teenage son, Mur, impoverished, surrounded by a hostile émigre community that believed she had been in league with her husband and, by extension, the NKVD. She knew well enough what was happening in Stalin’s Russia, though no one who wasn’t there could really imagine how bad it was. She had had a fateful meeting with Pasternak in Paris in 1935. In coded language—he was too scared to speak freely—he tried to warn her. But she did not understand. All she knew was that her family had abandoned her; her friends refused to speak with her. Nazi Germany rose in the east, and France was preparing, albeit too slowly, for war. Should she return to the USSR? A few years earlier she had written one of her greatest poems. “Homesickness,” it began, “what bullshit!” She wouldn’t return out of some misplaced sentiment about her so-called motherland. But her husband and her daughter were there.

  After a terrible period of indecision, Tsvetaeva took the train to Moscow in 1938. She found a frightened country. Her old friends avoided her; even her half sister declined to see her. (Her full sister, Anastasia Tsvetaeva, was already in the Gulag.) Efron and Ariadna were in an NKVD safe house outside Moscow, where Tsvetaeva and Mur joined them. Within six months, Efron and Ariadna were both arrested, and Tsvetaeva and her son were forced out of the house. They sought lodging with the remnants of their old family in Moscow. Meanwhile Mur, a spoiled teenager with limited Russian, had trouble adjusting to Soviet life. He made an already bad situation worse. Soon they joined the mass evacuation before the German advance, and life became even harder and more lonely. Eventually it became too much. Two years after they arrived, Tsvetaeva hanged herself. Efron, her overeducated husband, was shot by the NKVD that year. Her son, just barely out of hi
s teens, was killed at the front a few years later, in 1944. Only their daughter, Ariadna, who spent years in the Gulag, survived.

  My grandmother had come back from the bathroom now and we walked again into the theater. How much of this stuff had she been through? Some of it, for sure. She too was in Moscow when the Germans invaded, and she too was evacuated to the Soviet interior. Her father was ill and she was already pregnant with my mother, but when Stalin asked, people went, and in any case the Germans were coming. She too lost her husband during those years. But she was thirty years younger than Tsvetaeva. Her difficulties were less difficult. She survived.

  The film ended and the lights came up. It had been, to my surprise, admirably understated, scrupulously documented, intelligent, humane.

  My grandmother turned to me as we walked out and said, with a slightly sour expression on her face, “What did you think of it?”

  “I thought it was great!” I whispered.

  “I didn’t. I thought it was boring and pointless.”

  “What?” I said, much louder than I expected to. “How can you say that?”

  My grandmother pursed her lips and shook her head. I recognized the gesture because I had inherited it somehow, presumably via my mother, and used it when I was forced, almost against my will (said the gesture), to point out that some much-praised movie or TV show or book was in fact garbage. “I don’t know,” said my grandmother. “I just didn’t get it.”

  She was being a snob about this movie that had described this life with such care, that had resurrected and paid homage to the sufferings of an entire generation—sufferings that she herself, my grandmother, had shared! I was inexplicably miffed. They weren’t my sufferings. The extent of my suffering had been a mildly embarrassing car ride and having to leave the movie theater a couple of times so my grandmother could use the bathroom. (Was it something we ate?) And yet she was the one who wanted to see it!

  “You know what?” I said. “If you didn’t like this movie, then we won’t go to movies anymore! I don’t see the point.”

  She heard me. She stopped and turned to me. “Andryushik,” she said gently, “don’t get mad. I really didn’t understand what it was about. What was it about?”

  I had a thunderous look on my face, I could feel it, and then I felt it melt away. My poor grandmother. She couldn’t hear; even in a movie theater, with the giant speakers, it must have been difficult to understand everything that was happening. And her memory was terrible—how could she follow the narrative if she couldn’t remember anything from one minute to the next? Of course she didn’t enjoy the movie.

  “It was about Tsvetaeva,” I said.

  “Tsvetaeva?” she said. “That’s a wonderful poet.”

  “Yes. The film was about her life.”

  “She hanged herself,” said my grandmother. Then she added, “During the war.”

  My grandmother still remembered reams of Russian poetry, and she recited some now:

  No foreign sky protected me,

  no stranger’s wing shielded my face.

  I stand as witness to the common lot,

  survivor of that time, that place.

  “Yes . . .” my grandmother said. “Survivor of that time, that place.”

  I was confused. “Is that Tsvetaeva?” I asked.

  “No. Akhmatova.”

  She let me hail the car this time. It was almost ten o’clock, the streets had emptied a little, and we encountered no traffic on our way back home.

  12.

  I ENLIST

  THE THING ABOUT ME as a hockey player was that I wasn’t very good. I wasn’t bad, I was competent, but compared to my love of hockey, my skill was minuscule. In that gap lay all my disappointment. I was an OK player. But I wanted to be so much better.

  Still, I did what I could. In hockey there are two types of players—skill players and grinders. I was a grinder. My shot had never been very good, even in high school, and playing with Anton’s crappy stick didn’t make it any better; I had no moves that would allow me to buy space and time for myself in tight spots. I was pretty good at anticipating where the play would be and getting there, though I was bad at stickhandling with my head up, which would have allowed me to see and anticipate much more. I scored some goals that year, but the plays I remember were ones where I made a nice outlet pass to Anton or Oleg; or the time I managed to knock Grisha on his back with an open-ice check at our blue line, sending our bench into a spontaneous cheer; or the time I actually caught up to Alyosha from the white team as he maneuvered the puck toward our goal.

  But I was not a professional hockey player, nor would I ever be. As the rest of my life became busier, I had to cut down the hockey to a minimum. I still played against the white team on Wednesdays and Fridays, but I stopped going out to the hellscape rink next to the elevated gas line, and also the game with the locker room sheds in the parking lot.

  I decided to focus my article on Sergei’s departure from the university and his activities, in particular his teaching activities, since then. He had invented what he called mobile classrooms, though the mobile part of it was actually Sergei driving his old Lada. He had spent a few months putting up flyers around Moscow advertising a university-trained teacher to lead literature seminars for free. It took a while, he said, but eventually he had a steady set of about six or seven groups he met with on a weekly basis.

  The students in the classes were primarily, to my surprise, men, without much education, who wanted to talk about their experience of a world that was changing all around them. Sergei facilitated this, inserting the teachings of the literature they were reading where necessary, and at other times simply letting the men talk. He also taught high school students whose parents couldn’t afford tutors to prepare them for university entry exams, and he taught what essentially amounted to Russian language classes to workers from Central Asia. He would typically try to teach two or three classes in a day, organizing them in such a way that he didn’t have to travel too far in between. But Moscow was a big city and he did a lot of driving. I followed him for a week and by the end of those days I was so tired I could barely sleep. But Sergei seemed not to notice the exertion. He wasn’t paid by any of the people, although more often than not there was food at the meetings, and during the evenings a beer, and at one of the classes I attended, in the dormitory of some workers from Tajikistan, the men gave him a traditional Tajik tambourine as a sign of their gratitude—at that point he had been teaching their class for exactly one year.

  It wasn’t all some kind of montage from an inspirational film about radical education. Half the classes I came to were ill attended—two or three people. At one meeting, four middle-aged men with big guts who’d decided to embark on a program of self-improvement demanded to know why Sergei had assigned them Tsvetaeva, whom the men merrily referred to as a slut even after Sergei had explained why they shouldn’t. But perhaps the worst incident I saw was the mother of a boy Sergei was helping prepare for his exams—for free, alongside another boy—badgering Sergei about the theoretical nature of the small class’s discussions. Couldn’t he just tell them what sort of questions were going to be asked by the examiners? Sergei tried to answer that the boys needed to learn how to think about literature, but the mother wasn’t mollified. She relented only after he suggested that learning how to think about literature in a theoretical mode would actually allow her son to answer questions about books he hadn’t even read. “So he doesn’t have to read all these books?” she asked.

  “N-n-n-n-no, he does,” said Sergei. “But there might be books on the exam that we don’t have.” The mother, a thin woman with big blue eyes who appeared to live alone in this neat but ancient one-room apartment with her teenage son, nodded suspiciously and retreated into the kitchen.

  Still, it was incredible—not just because it was exhausting, discouraging, mentally draining, and even possibly dangerous, but
because he wasn’t being paid. His wife worked as an editor at Lenta.ru, a large media company, and earned a small but sufficient living, and the only money Sergei contributed was from playing goalie in the various men’s leagues—he got twenty dollars every time he came out, which was about three times a week. In a sense it was not so much the actual teaching that so impressed me, though that too, but the willingness to live off his wife. Sergei admitted that it was a source of tension within the family. “It’s like she married one person, and now she’s living with another person,” he said of his wife. “And she thinks this new person cares more about his political beliefs than about her and her daughter.”

  “Is that true?”

  “No. Maybe. I don’t know. I want my daughter to live in a fair country. But my wife wants me to get a job.”

  He felt bad about it, but he wasn’t going to change. From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. It had the force—or should have had the force—of a biblical injunction. And that’s how Sergei lived.

  We were getting into March now, and I was hearing more and more from Dima. “You’re definitely leaving at the end of the summer, right?” he said one day over Gchat.

  “I don’t know,” I said. I had recently learned that my old nemesis Fishman was also applying for the Watson job—it was a mediocre college, it was isolated, the closest cultural attraction was a giant federal penitentiary, but the job market was tight and at least at Watson they wouldn’t make you teach German. Then my adviser told me, to my amazement and chagrin, that Watson had brought in Richard Sutherland, from Princeton, the man who had asked me to fetch him seltzer water at the airport, to head up the search committee. (“They wanted someone who didn’t know anything to help mislead the other people who don’t know anything” was how my adviser put it; we both knew that this meant Fishman now had an inside track for the job.) But now, talking to Dima, I tried to put on a brave face. “I’m applying for a job for the fall,” I told him, “and I hope I get it. But if I don’t, I think I’ll stay here.”