A Terrible Country

by Keith Gessen

  It was Shipalkin who had gotten the couple involved with Sergei and October, but it was Yulia who became committed to it. She was very taken with Sergei’s critique of privatized higher education, and though she did not consider herself a very outgoing person, she did have a knack for spotting malcontents. She had met Boris at a public lecture in which he asked an aggressive question, and she had met Misha during his university protest campaign. “And you, of course.”

  “Me?”

  “Remember I wrote you after that dinner?”

  “Of course! But I’ve never understood why.”

  “Well, I got the impression that you were unhappy with the U.S. educational system, and also that you didn’t like Fishman,” she said. “I found this an appealing combination. You seemed a little confused, but willing to stand up for your beliefs.”

  I wondered if that was true. I hoped that it was. As I reached Tsvetnoi Boulevard, near our place, I saw a Kroshka Kartoshka. It was a freestanding little plastic building, the size of a Chinese takeout place, with a big white counter and a few tables and chairs; they’d plunked it down in the middle of the boulevard, a little hut on city property, no doubt because some bureaucrat had been paid a bribe. “Kroshka Kartoshka” meant “little potato,” and that is what they served: baked potatoes. They’d split the top open and you could choose a filling—mushrooms, or chicken salad, or cheese, or some combination. This is what Russians had been doing with potatoes for generations. It was, maybe, a little gross, and to see it here in this hut in the middle of Tsvetnoi Boulevard—it was a little unseemly, something shameful made public. But it was our shared, national shame. “We like to bake potatoes and put gross stuff in them to make them taste better”—this is what the Kroshka Kartoshka stand said. There was a chain of them across the city, in these little huts, and I went in. I ordered a potato with bacon and onion inside, paid fifty cents for it, and then ate it contemplatively at one of the little plastic tables, without taking off my coat. Then I finally went home. It was four in the morning now. My grandmother would be getting up soon. But I was able to sleep until ten, and my grandmother didn’t mind.

  PART III

  1.

  YULIA

  YULIA AND I began going out. During the day, she was usually at the university and I was reading student blog posts about Uncle Vanya and hanging around with my grandmother until she went to bed, but after that, Moscow was ours. It was a city that stayed up late. The subway closed early but all the bars and cafés and movie theaters remained open, and after eleven o’clock I could get to Yulia’s place in about ten minutes, if I paid a hundred rubles for a car that would take me down Rozhdestvenskiy Boulevard. Afterward I could get home in the same amount of time, for the same price, though on the way back I tended to take the Garden Ring. The cabs really sped like crazy down the Garden Ring at night.

  What did we do together? It was, for the most part, normal stuff. Her roommate Katya’s schedule changed shortly after Yulia and I started going out, so she was around more, and this meant that spending time at Yulia’s place was not entirely appealing. So we kept going to the movies; we even went to some cafés. Experiencing Moscow with Yulia was something completely new to me. I wasn’t transported out of the city; in fact some of its latent violence, the way aggressive men dominated public spaces, became clearer to me when walking around with her. And in all other ways too it was the same unsmiling, expensive place. But I saw how Yulia handled it. She was exceedingly polite, even formal, with people she did not know. (I recognized in this my grandmother’s politeness and formality, which she kept up even with many people she did know, because she forgot that she knew them.) She was a master of withholding her approval; outside a tight circle of friends, she kept up a defensive shield. But inside that circle, and inside the city that the circle had created within the larger city, was a whole other world. The Octobrists had carved a little path through Moscow that allowed them to enjoy it. None of them made much money, or even any. They couldn’t be full citizens of the consumer paradise that Moscow had become. But there were little cafés and bookstores and bookstore-cafés where you could sit and have tea or a beer for a couple of dollars and read Derrida for a few hours without anyone bothering you. Even critical theory, which had fallen out of fashion back in the United States, was still cool here. It was the Moscow I had once hoped existed but couldn’t find. Now here it was.

  For Yulia, I soon learned, the world was divided into two kinds of people: her people and other people; good and evil. Men were, for the most part, evil. Women were allies in the fight against men or they were traitors. Some were traitors out of weakness, others out of treachery. And theoretically, some men were allies also. Boris, barely masculine, sexually neutered, was OK; so was weird, pathetic Nikolai, with his quixotic dacha that no one wanted to help him build. Misha and Sergei were treated with suspicion: Misha because of his drinking and not very good treatment of Yulia’s roommate Masha, Sergei for more complicated reasons. “He’s been stringing his poor wife along for almost as long as I’ve known him,” Yulia said. “He can’t stand the thought of breaking up his own family. But he’s chosen his path and he needs to stay on it.”

  “He wants to be a good person,” I said.

  “He wants to keep his conscience clean. There’s a difference.”

  Whatever bad ideas she’d already had about men, starting with her father, were confirmed, to a tee, by Shipalkin. “He was such a nice boy when we met,” she said. “But he was weak.” Another time: “Did you see that scarf he was wearing when he came by the reading group? He’s very proud of that scarf. Fishman gave it to him, you know. He thinks it’s the latest in American fashion.”

  She could be incredibly cutting like this, even cruel. But to be on her side of it was to be exempted. “You’re not like that, are you?” she said one time, when discussing the depredations on this occasion of Misha, who was always getting drunk and cheating on Masha.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  But Yulia insisted. “You’re not,” she said. “I can tell.” To be chosen like this to fight on the side of good versus evil—even if you didn’t totally deserve it—was intoxicating. I never wanted to leave.

  In retrospect I see there was a kind of baseline pain-in-the-assness to everything we did. We didn’t live that far from each other but neither of us had our own private space and in the end we spent a lot of time walking this way and that. She had an ex who was still sort of hanging around—after the arrests of his friends, Shipalkin had remained in Moscow, writing long self-justifying entries on his LiveJournal page. Yulia said she never wanted to see him again and, as far as I know, she stuck to that resolution. But even without Shipalkin her life was not simple. She had a mother in Kiev who needed help and attention; she lived in her room in shifts and had to constantly change her sheets. On top of that, when we started going out, it was still cold. I remember one night in late March, after seeing another movie, walking along Pokrovka Street, on a sidewalk that was only barely cleared of snow and not cleared of ice at all, so that it was pretty much all you could do to keep from falling down, and passing several cafés that were bright and welcoming. If we’d had more money we could have stopped, but these were places that charged twelve dollars for a pot of tea! So we kept going. I felt embarrassed and unmanned that I could not afford to get my girlfriend out of the cold, but Yulia didn’t even seem to see these places. Eventually we reached a café that had reasonable prices, and for about fifteen minutes we sat there shivering, and then eventually we forgot all about our awful journey, and even split an éclair. The difficulties of being together, staying together, and getting together in the first place made me feel like, if we could just get through this one situation, or the next, that we would be all right pretty much forever.

  Yulia’s work situation was lousy. Her college president was corrupt, her department head was corrupt, and in large part as a result of these corruptions they neede
d more work from the teaching staff. They were especially distrustful of people who didn’t joyfully participate in the corruption, though Yulia, with her private tutoring and ghostwriting, participated more than she would have liked. She did it because she had to but also because, like me, she couldn’t bear to leave. “I have some wonderful students,” she said. “I love talking with them about Avvakum”—one of the crazy old clerics she studied. “Where else would I be able to do that?” Sergei’s answer—do it voluntarily, in the community, on your own time—was not an option. She needed to make money. Yulia was trapped.

  We spent hours walking around Moscow—it remained cold well into April—looking for places to sit and drink a tea. I had never dated anyone like Yulia before, and I had never dated anyone in Russian before. At first I found it easy—I could sit happily and watch Yulia talk and it was not necessarily expected that I talk back. But then I started finding it difficult—when accused of something, usually something true, my vocabulary of defense was limited, and my mind short-circuited to anger.

  “You have no idea how we’ve lived here,” she said once. We had stopped to eat some dumplings in a small basement cafeteria near the university. The food was cheap and pretty good, and the only problem was that it was in the basement and kind of dark. Also on the way over we’d almost been hit by a falling icicle. In the first part of April, during the days, the temperature would sometimes rise above zero and the sun would come out, melting the winter snow, but then at night the temperature would fall again, freezing into giant icicles the water that had begun to drip from the roofs. As the weather warmed up more consistently, these sharp, massive chunks of ice started falling from the rooftops and killing people. So we had just survived these dangers and I was in a foul mood with regard to Moscow and Russia and in short I said something critical about the lighting in the basement cafeteria, and Yulia got mad. “You have no idea how we’ve lived. You have no idea how valuable a place like this is.”

  She was right. I liked the place! I should not have displaced my anger at the icicles onto it. And I think in English I’d have taken Yulia’s defense of it in stride. After being a too-serious little boy I had developed an ironic disposition. Nothing affected me too deeply. Some people I’d known found this off-putting, but in this situation it would have come in handy. I’d have joked her indignation away.

  In Russian I didn’t know how, and I was wounded. I threw up my hands like a person who was at the end of his rope, who felt like he couldn’t say anything without being attacked and so therefore had decided to say nothing. I stewed in this non-saying for a while until Yulia relented and forgave me. But I found this sort of thing happening with some regularity; Yulia was a very serious person who sometimes took things to heart, and whether I would have been able to deflect our conversations in the proper direction if they had been happening in English, I don’t know. In Russian I was unable to.

  But this was also OK. The same inability to joke, to parry and deflect, made me kinder. I was impatient sometimes, and angry sometimes, but I was never cutting, I was never sarcastic, I never made a quip that took a second to think up and six months, somehow or other, to take back.

  For a while I was nervous about introducing Yulia to my grandmother. I worried it might upset the delicate balance we had finally achieved in our domestic arrangement. At the same time, hadn’t she been urging me to get married? Not that Yulia was necessarily intent on marrying me. We had just started going out. But I was thinking about it. I had even asked, idly, if she’d be willing to move to the States. “No,” she said immediately. “My mother is in Kiev and I’m all she has. It’s bad enough that I’m in Moscow. If I moved to America it would kill her.”

  “Maybe she can move to America too?” I said.

  I imagined all of us—me, Yulia, her mother, my grandmother—living in a big apartment in Brooklyn, taking long walks together in Prospect Park, saying hello to the other Russians, going to movies at the big movie theater at the corner of the park. “OK,” said Yulia. “Are we going to fly there in a golden helicopter?”

  Fair enough. But at the time everything seemed possible. “Just think about it,” I said.

  So I did very much want to introduce her to my grandmother. And I was wrong to worry. “Yulia,” said my grandmother, when I brought Yulia over one late afternoon. “That’s a very pretty name.” And she laughed as Yulia and I took off our coats and boots. She seemed genuinely happy. We sat down and all drank some tea.

  * * *

  • • •

  In general, though, my grandmother was suffering. Her stay in the hospital had destroyed her mobility. Where she had previously paced the apartment like an athlete preparing for a test of endurance, she now shuffled from her bedroom to the kitchen and back again. Sometimes she brought her cane and sometimes she didn’t, indicating that the cane was not absolutely necessary. But without it she was off-balance, and survived by holding on to various walls and pieces of furniture. She knew where everything was, deep in her bones, and so no matter the time of night she always managed to hang on to something. Still, it meant we weren’t going on a lot of walks. For the moment, with icicles falling on people’s heads, this was OK, but I wondered if, when the weather turned, she would want to be out again.

  She even stopped enjoying the TV news. One evening I put it on for her in the back room and went into the kitchen to work on the windowsill. A few minutes later I heard her calling for me. “Andryush, Andryush!” she said. There was real distress in her voice and I ran to her.

  My grandmother was where I had left her, on the green foldout couch, in front of the TV.

  “Is everything OK?” I said.

  “Oy, oy,” said my grandmother, gesturing toward the television. “Who is that man?”

  The man was Putin.

  “Who?”

  “He’s the prime minister.”

  “Oy, what a horrible face! Make him go away,” said my grandmother. I flipped through the channels a bit and landed on a Russian police procedural.

  “How about this?” I said.

  “OK,” said my grandmother.

  I went back to the kitchen. Fifteen minutes later I heard a crash in the back room. I ran there. My grandmother was standing, looking horrified, next to the TV stand. The television was on its back on the floor. It had somehow survived the fall and was showing Putin visiting a truck factory in Nizhny Novgorod. Apparently the cop show had ended and the news had come on. “Andryush, I’m sorry,” said my terrified grandmother, as if I would be angry at her for knocking over her own TV. “I was trying to change the channel.”

  She was trying to change the channel by, apparently, pushing the TV to the floor. The TV was fine, it kept working, but as there was always the danger that Putin might appear, from now on I basically had to be in there with her so I could change the channel. Next time, after all, the TV might land on her foot.

  This was not good. I could try to show her movies but she hated all the movies we saw; we couldn’t go outside; and there were only so many times I could play anagrams.

  It was Sergei who inadvertently came up with a solution. He was driving me home from hockey one night when he said: “We think about the Soviet Union in terms of mistakes and crimes. The camps, the lack of preparation for the war, the forced psychiatric confinement of dissidents. But for a lot of people it was an OK place. It was free medicine, free housing, free education. And above all, cultural production, above all, movies: you know, contrary to the predictions of early film theorists, movies aren’t actually a highly ideologized space. They’re a mass entertainment. In order to be massively entertaining they need to have some basis in reality. There weren’t any Soviet films about the Gulag but there were some pretty good Soviet films. It’s one of the things the workers’ state needs least to be embarrassed about.”

  Was this true? There was a kiosk outside the Clean Ponds metro station that sold DVDs.
I had bought some new Russian films there to watch with my grandmother, but most of them were unwatchable. Even the good ones were filled with violence—that was the new Russian reality, and these guys were making movies reflecting that reality. My grandmother didn’t like them, and I didn’t blame her.

  But what about Soviet films? It hadn’t for some reason occurred to me to show my grandmother old movies. I didn’t know much about them. In school I’d watched the old post-revolutionary classics, and then the great works of the late Soviet underground. But aside from Irony of Fate—the classic 1970s movie about a very drunk doctor who accidentally boards a flight to Leningrad and then takes a taxi to the same address as his Moscow address, and finds an apartment there just like his apartment, except occupied by a woman different from his fiancée; all Russians watched this film on New Year’s Eve, including my parents—Soviet popular film was not something I knew much about. I asked Yulia if she had any suggestions. “Well, you could try Osenniy Marafon,” she said.

  They had Autumn Marathon at the Clean Ponds kiosk, and a few days later my grandmother and I sat down in the back room to screen it. “Oh!” my grandmother said during the first sequence. “Leningrad!” We had watched numerous post-Soviet movies set in St. Petersburg, but my grandmother had never recognized it; the movies didn’t present the city in a way she understood. Autumn Marathon did.

  The movie is about a college professor and translator in Soviet Leningrad who is having an affair. His main motivation for the affair is not lust or boredom or revenge; it is a sense of guilt and obligation. Everyone takes advantage of the professor: he rewrites his colleague’s poor translations; he spends hours with a visiting scholar from Denmark, helping him understand Lermontov; he is even unable to resist the importunities of his drunken neighbor, who insists that he and the Dane go mushroom hunting with him and drink a bunch of vodka. When his long-suffering wife confronts him with his affair he feels terrible and promises to break it off; but when his mistress threatens suicide if he does, he goes back to her. Through it all he has to contend with the drawbridges of Leningrad, which are raised every night at a certain hour, cutting off the old city (where he works, and where his mistress lives) from the new city, where he lives with his wife. He jogs each morning with the visiting Dane, but is also constantly running to catch a bus to take him across the bridge before it goes up, and sometimes he doesn’t make it—thus, autumn marathon. Halfway through the film he resolves to change his life; by the end of the film this resolve is in shambles, and we know things will go on as before.