A Terrible Country

by Keith Gessen

  “And do what?”

  “What I’m doing.”

  “That’s ridiculous!” Dima typed. “Grandma is going to get worse and worse. At some point she’s going to need help taking a shower. She’s not going to want you to do that. We’re going to need a nurse and it’s going to cost money and it’s not money that I have if we don’t sell.”

  But there are some things that should not be done for money, I thought. I was sitting at the windowsill. It was past midnight on a Friday—I had returned from hockey and was drinking a Zhigulovskoye with some sushki. As we were arguing over Gchat my grandmother came out of her room, in her nightgown, to go to the bathroom. Her fall and subsequent stay in the hospital had disrupted her sleeping patterns, I think, and she got up now more often in the night. She saw me and waved.

  Some things must not be done for money. They must be apportioned instead along communistic principles—from each according to his ability, to each according to his need. Dima could type at me all he wanted—I was staying put.

  After following Sergei around for a while, I decided that I had enough material, and I sat down and wrote it up. I placed his work in the context of quixotic Russian attempts to reorganize the world. Sergei struck me as a Tolstoy figure, the sort of person who gives up everything to wander the earth and follow the dictates of his conscience. He was wandering Moscow, not the earth, and he was not doing so barefoot but in a rickety Lada. I was not suggesting that Sergei was a saint. I was suggesting, I guess, that he was a fool—a holy fool. He was doing what all of us would have wanted to do, but were too cautious, too practical, too chickenshit to do.

  I wrote the article and sent it to both Sergei and the Slavic Review. It was a long shot. I had sent more than a few articles to the Slavic Review over the years, with zero results. This one was better, but that was no reason to think it would meet with more success. The Slavic Review was far away. Whereas October, Sergei, my hockey team, my grandmother, and eventually, I still hoped, Yulia, were right here.

  * * *

  • • •

  Not long after I sent off my article, Sergei asked somewhat formally if we could meet. My first thought was that he’d hated the article. My second thought was darker: that he and/or October were mad about Yulia. I had kissed her, and then I had made that comment about Shipalkin in front of the police station. Had I let my feelings about Yulia cloud my political judgment? I had continued seeing Yulia at the Marxist seminars and she seemed to have stopped being mad at me, but neither did she seem like she particularly wanted to talk. And Shipalkin, her husband, was still in Lefortovo.

  Sergei and I agreed to meet at a Mu-Mu café about a mile from my place. If he was mad about the article, I could deal with that. Another alternative was that, now that I’d filed the article, I no longer had an excuse to be hanging around, and so therefore had to leave. But I didn’t want to leave. I liked what I was doing. Even without Yulia, I had become very attached to the entire October group.

  I played all the bad scenarios out in my mind as I made my way to Mu-Mu. Mu-Mu, as in the sound a cow makes, was in a basement and was cafeteria style and very cheap and pretty good. If it had been a little closer to our house I’d have been able to take my grandmother there whenever we needed food. I found Sergei sitting there in front of a bowl of borscht. I got my own bowl of borscht and sat down with him. Sergei got right to it.

  “Listen,” he said. “I don’t know w-w-what your plans are or feelings are, but now that you’re done with your article, I wanted to ask you about something.”

  I nodded.

  “We—October—are going to start a website soon. We want to have a space to discuss leftist politics, educational theory, cultural events, that sort of thing. We think it’s important for the left to have that kind of platform.”

  “That sounds good.” This seemed to me a rather roundabout way of kicking me out of the group.

  “And we think that a certain amount of it—not all of it, definitely, but the good stuff—would be worth translating into English, as a way of building solidarity internationally. One of the troubles with the Russian left the past few decades has been its isolation from the West. We need to end that.”

  I agreed again.

  “So a few of us were talking, and I know you were involved largely for research purposes, but we’d really like it if you were the one who translated the texts. You understand what we’re doing. And your English is good.”

  “Ah!” I said. I was immensely relieved. “I’d love to do that.”

  “We can’t pay you, of course.”

  “No, I wouldn’t want you to.” This was mostly true. However little money I had, these guys had less.

  “OK. Well, great.” Sergei bent down and spooned some borscht into his mouth. “There’s one more thing. Would you be willing to join October? It would make working together easier and I think more pleasant.”

  This was unexpected.

  “I would consider it an honor,” I said. “What do I have to do?”

  “Well.” Sergei seemed mildly embarrassed. “There’s an oath. A few years ago when we were starting we had a long argument about it, but we decided it was the right thing: it would spell out the responsibilities of the party to you, and of you to the party.”

  “OK,” I said. “What is it?”

  It was a short oath. “I pledge to do what is best for the party in accordance with my conscience, and to try to live honestly and directly in a way that will bring credit to the party. The party in turn pledges to help me, to advise me, and to support me should I need support.” Sergei stopped. “That’s it.”

  We did it right then and there in the Mu-Mu café. I was now a member of October. In the next few weeks, I started getting the first of the texts to translate into English. And I continued attending the reading group. My entry into October meant that people confided in me more. Misha told me about his drinking problem, Boris about the fact that his mother wanted him to move out and get married. Sergei had always been honest with me, but now as his marriage moved into its death agony I felt almost like his only confidant. His wife had said that she couldn’t live like this any longer; he had told her that he couldn’t live any other way; they were at an impasse. Sergei felt like there was no way to fix it but he worried, as his wife did also, about their daughter. “It’s normal for people to change,” he said. “We got married while we were still in college. Of course we changed. But it’s impossible for a child to understand. If only there were some way to tell them, from the start, that mama and papa isn’t forever. That each of us will still be here but not necessarily together. There must be some way, because otherwise it’s a lie.” He was in a bind of his own creation, but that didn’t make it less painful, it seemed to me.

  Yulia continued to be guarded with me, and that was understandable: her husband was in jail and she spent a lot of time thinking about him, standing in line to visit him, talking with lawyers about his case. Yes, we had kissed, but that was long ago. I would find someone else to kiss, probably. Howard, amazingly, after months of sleeping with girls from the online hooker website, had met a nice girl who worked at Russian Esquire and was dating her. He had suggested to me that she might have friends who were single. And Oleg, in the locker room, had suggested the same thing. “Andrei,” he asked me one day, “do you have a girl?”

  “No,” I said.

  “My girl has a friend who might be interested,” Oleg said. The word he used for his “girl” was actually telka, a calf—it was in this context a word for “mistress.” And so it was that a few days later I found myself sitting at a gaudy, expensive café off Clean Ponds with Oleg, Oleg’s calf, and Oleg’s calf’s friend, named Polina. Oleg’s calf was a quiet, mousy girl who kept fiddling with her phone, but Polina was a tall, healthy, attractive twenty-five-year-old. They worked at a beauty salon together. A few months earlier I would have jumped at the chance, b
ut now I couldn’t find any enthusiasm inside myself. When Oleg suggested we all go to a club together to continue the evening, I said I had to get back and check on my grandmother. “All right,” said Oleg, and didn’t hold it against me.

  One evening a few nights hence, as my grandmother was whipping me at anagrams, I got a text. It was from Yulia.

  “Are you able to come out?” it said.

  It was eight o’clock on a Friday. I had hockey but I could skip it. Presumably Yulia wanted to tell me what Sergei had failed to—that she wanted me out of the reading group. Maybe I could talk her out of it. I texted back that I would be happy to come out, and even, as a show of courage, added a smiley face—Russians did so by just using a bunch of parentheses, like this: ))) It was an odd way to make a face, since there were no eyes, but on the other hand you could use as many parentheses as you wanted, to indicate a supersmile. I used four parentheses. But as I made my way to the Czech beer place near her house I felt like a man on his way to an execution.

  She was there already when I showed up, looking pale and beautiful and nervous and already drinking a glass of wine.

  “Privet,” I said.

  “Privet,” she said. She seemed upset. I didn’t say anything. She asked politely after my grandmother and then she said, “You were right about Petya.” Petya was Shipalkin. She looked miserable as she said it.

  “I was?”

  “He’s been released,” said Yulia.

  “That’s good!” I said, partly meaning it.

  Yulia didn’t seem to have heard me. “He gave everyone up,” she said.

  “What?”

  “He ratted them out. Told on them.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “I do. His lawyer said he was looking at five years, that there was no hope unless he cooperated with the investigation and named the other members of Mayhem.”

  “Don’t the police know the other members of Mayhem already?”

  “They seem not to have. I don’t know. But Petya was released two days ago and yesterday they picked up two of the guys and another of them took a train to Kiev.”

  “Wow,” I said. It sounded like he really had given them up. Why was Yulia telling me this?

  “Well,” I said, not knowing what else to say, “what’s he doing now?”

  “I don’t know,” said Yulia, “and I don’t care.”

  She took a sip of her wine.

  “Will you do me a favor, Andrei?”

  I nodded.

  “Will you get drunk with me?”

  So we got drunk. As we did so I tried not to think too much about what I was doing. Was Yulia vulnerable right now, due to her ex-husband’s shameful behavior? And was I, by sticking around while she was in this vulnerable state, taking advantage of that? And did this also mean—I couldn’t help but think—that once she was no longer in this state, she would lose interest again? Yulia was wearing tight white jeans and a small black cotton sweater that hugged her torso. She was a thin girl, and very pale. Her big green eyes in such a face gave her a particularly pained look. Russian girls, even intellectual Marxist Russian girls, starved themselves. And yet in Yulia’s case it didn’t matter. I liked it. Not her starving, of course. But how she looked.

  She was drunk after three glasses of wine, whereas I, after the same number of beers, was merely a little giddy. I walked her to her house, a twelve-story block not far from Patriarch Ponds, and on the doorstep we stopped. “Good night, Andrei,” she said, and hugged me. I would have preferred that she kiss me but she also seemed so upset, so unhappy, that I mostly just wanted her to be less so. We said good-bye, and she went inside.

  After that, we began to text each other, and go to the movies. This was innocent enough, in the sense that we weren’t necessarily going to the movies romantically. I didn’t want to hurry her. I did, however, want to impress her, and at first, as with my grandmother, I tried to do so by finding artsy films. Then she confessed that she actually didn’t mind seeing something less high-minded, so with some relief we did that. We watched the Russian version of Titanic, called Admiral, about the White admiral Kolchak, who fought the Bolsheviks, and a kind of Russian Flashdance, called Stilyagi, “The Stylish Ones,” about a group of 1950s rebels in Moscow who adopted colorful clothing and jazz music as a form of protest against the stifling sartorial conformity of Stalinism. That was the movie Yulia and I saw the night she invited me up to her apartment.

  That night, Moscow changed for me forever. It went from being the terrible place where I was born to being—something else. I wanted to be at home when my grandmother woke up, so in the middle of the night I whispered a good night to Yulia and went downstairs. It was three o’clock in the morning and mid-March in Moscow, and it was still pretty cold. The subway was closed and if I didn’t want to walk I would have to take a cab; but I did not feel like sharing my feelings, my joy and sense of belonging, with anyone, and so I walked. It was about a mile and a half to our place, and cold and quiet, and walking down the side streets approaching the great big, awful highway that is the Garden Ring, I felt the terrible freedom of this place. It was a fortress set down in a hostile environment. On one side the Mongols; on the other the Germans, Balts, and Vikings. So the Russians built this fortress here on a bend in the Yauza River, and hoped for the best. They built it big because they were scared. It was a gigantic country, and even now, in the twenty-first century, barely governed. You could do anything, really. And amid this freedom, this anarchy, people met and fell in love and tried to comfort one another.

  On our last few dates, but also, especially, when we were lying in bed together, I’d learned about Yulia’s family. She had grown up in Kiev, an only child, as most children of that generation were only children, because everyone was so poor; her parents were both engineers. When the country started falling apart, they saw the writing on the wall and decided that, since Yulia’s father was Jewish, they would emigrate to Israel. Yulia was eleven when her father left to scout it out and find work while Yulia’s mother sold off their things and prepared for the move. At first he was in touch often, relating the difficulty of adjusting to immigrant life, complaining about the other immigrants, worrying that he would not find work; but soon he seemed to get very busy, and was in touch less often. Yulia’s mother nonetheless continued to sell off their things, because they weren’t going to take, for example, their television with them to Israel, nor their sofa, and it was a few days after they sold their television that Yulia’s mother heard, from a mutual acquaintance, that her husband had been seen with another woman on the streets of Haifa. Over the phone Yulia’s mother confronted her husband, who confessed, but said he still wanted them to come over, that they were still married and he would take care of all the arrangements, and then, when it was settled, they could peacefully divorce. Yulia’s mother screamed—Yulia was in her room, quietly reading—and hung up, and though Yulia’s father continued to try to send money, through various acquaintances who were traveling back and forth, Yulia’s mother refused it. As a result, little Yulia grew up very poor, albeit in a place where everyone else was poor, without a television or a sofa to help pass the time.

  Her mother never recovered. She managed to get her job back but it was at a research institute and not much of a job. She put all her energy into Yulia, forming what sounded like a sometimes toxic, sometimes wonderful, always deeply intense relationship. In the dispute with her father, Yulia had taken her mother’s side entirely. Eventually she had gone to college in Kiev and studied literary theory; in one of her classes she met Shipalkin, and soon, like most people they knew, they were married. Then Shipalkin got a job doing graphic design in Moscow, and Yulia applied and was accepted to grad school. They moved. Just before they left Kiev, her aunt, her mother’s sister and best friend, died in a car accident. Yulia had always felt guilty about leaving, and thought frequently of moving back.

 
Transplanted to Moscow, the marriage began to falter. They had met when they were both awkward young people adjusting to university life; now Shipalkin was discovering that he had other possibilities. “There were so many pretty girls, and he was no longer a boy who didn’t know how to button his shirt correctly,” Yulia said. “It turned his head.” He started coming home later from work, and eventually admitted he was sleeping with one of the other designers at his office. Yulia kicked him out; she stayed in the apartment, or rather their room in the apartment, with two roommates, though she soon found that she couldn’t afford the room on her own and invited a friend of hers from Kiev to share the room with her. Her friend Katya worked the night shift at a TV production company and so, for the most part, Yulia had the room to herself at night and Katya had it during the day. It had been confusing and complicated at first but now Yulia was used to it. And she was used to Moscow, she said, or at least was beginning to get used to it.

  “It was very hard for my mother when I left,” Yulia said, “and I thought that after Shipalkin and I separated, I could go back. But there is no work in Kiev. The place is being robbed blind. Here at least I can make a little money and send some of it home.” She tutored kids for the entrance exams and even ghostwrote PhD dissertations for government officials—exactly the sort of thing Sergei quit academia over. She went home to visit—it was a night’s train ride—about once a month.

  Everything here was twice as hard as in New York, I thought, as I made my way home that first night from Yulia’s place in the cold. It was harder to get around, it was harder to find a sweater, it was harder to get a seat on the subway, it was harder to find somewhere to eat or somewhere to live—grad students had trouble making ends meet in New York too, but I’d never heard of two people who weren’t romantically involved sharing the same bed. And this place was more unjust, it was far more unjust. Just the other day in Sad, where I’d had my date with Sonya from the internet, a man had shot a woman when she’d demanded an apology from him for spilling his drink on her. “You’re a fat cow,” he said. Then he shot her in the leg. He worked, like half the country, apparently, at RussOil, and would probably get away with it.