A Terrible Country

by Keith Gessen

  “Whatever,” said Dima.

  Miklos told the soldiers they could stay until the end of the summer.

  I would be sad to see them go.

  2.

  MY GRANDMOTHER THROWS A PARTY

  IT WAS FINALLY SPRING. The snow melted and for a few weeks everything was muddy, but the sun shone and it was warm and my grandmother and I started going for walks again. I had rejected Dima’s plan to sell the apartment on instinct; beyond that I didn’t really know what to do. If I was going to stay here, Yulia and I should try to move in together. I could displace Katya and move into Yulia’s room, but that was the room she lived in with Shipalkin before they broke up—a bad idea. She could come live with me and my grandmother, and I could replace the bunk beds or just place them side by side—but as Yulia had thus far not even agreed to sleep over this was maybe a stretch. I walked up and down the boulevard with my grandmother, trying to figure it out.

  Her ninetieth birthday was coming up. I wasn’t sure how she felt about celebrating it but a few days after the blowup with Dima she turned to me and said, “You know, I’m about to turn one hundred.”

  “Well, almost,” I said. “You’re about to turn ninety.”

  “How’s that?” she said.

  “Well, what year were you born?”

  “In 1919.”

  “And now it’s 2009. So that makes you ninety.”

  My grandmother looked at me, unconvinced. “Maybe,” she said.

  Either way, it seemed like a big deal, and I decided we should throw a party. I made sure Emma Abramovna could come on that day, and I invited Yulia and her roommates, our reading group, and Sergei, as well as the soldiers. “I have invited some people to come over on your birthday,” I told my grandmother.

  “You have? But how will we feed them?”

  “Seraphima Mikhailovna will make a nice meal for them,” I said.

  My grandmother agreed, but she did not quite agree. The next day, in the late morning, she started getting dressed to go out. “I need to get some things for the birthday party,” she said.

  “Like what?”

  “All sorts of things,” said my grandmother.

  I decided to go with her, and together we walked to the market. The ground was a little wet still from the melting snow but the sun was out. It was nice.

  At the market my grandmother headed for the baked goods. “Do you think the guests want this pie?” she said, pointing to her favorite poppy-seed pie.

  “Maybe,” I said. “But the party is two weeks away. Why don’t we buy it a little closer to then, so it’s fresher?”

  “Let’s buy it now so we don’t have to worry about it,” said my grandmother.

  I decided not to argue. And the next day I did not accompany her as she went again to get more birthday supplies; I watched her from her bedroom window as she slowly but surely made her way, sometimes leaning on her cane and other times ignoring it, out of the courtyard and toward the market. The birthday party was inspiring my grandmother to leave the house—I wasn’t going to argue with that, even if some of the things she was bringing back—for example, grapes—were not going to make it. Sometimes I ended up eating the food she bought; other times she would eat it herself, forgetting why she’d bought it. I began to think of it as more of a two-week birthday feast than a waste of energy.

  And why not? You only turn ninety once. Especially if you think you’re turning one hundred. When the day of the party finally arrived I got up in the morning and sent out a reminder email to all the guests; I also called and talked with Emma Abramovna and her caretaker, Valya, to make sure they were still coming. (By this point Emma Abramovna had received numerous calls on the subject from my grandmother. “I’m turning one hundred,” my grandmother would say. Pause. “No, I am. I did the math.” Another pause. “Are you sure? Well, how old are you?” Emma Abramovna was eighty-seven. “Really?” said my grandmother, surprised. She couldn’t be thirteen years older than Emma Abramovna.)

  After emailing everyone, I ate some breakfast and began doing the dishes. I noticed that the water wasn’t draining. This had happened before but it had responded well to my jamming it with a plunger. I did this now and it seemed to get better, but when I went into the bathroom, the sink there wasn’t draining. They were connected, these sinks, and I had merely shifted the problem from one to the other.

  I now plungered the bathroom sink. The water drained but when I returned to the kitchen, it didn’t drain again. At this point my grandmother came into the kitchen and saw that something was wrong.

  “Andryush, what’s the matter?”

  “The sink is clogged. But we’ll unclog it.”

  “Do you know how?”

  “Yes,” I said, and went into my room. I did not know how. It was now ten o’clock. Seraphima Mikhailovna was coming at noon, and the guests at five. We were in trouble.

  I called Dima’s handyman, Stepan. He picked up on the second ring. “I’m in Irkutsk,” he said, “visiting family. You’re an educated person, you’ll figure it out. There’s a snake under the sink. Use that.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “No problem,” said Stepan, and hung up.

  Stepan’s confidence in me, however ironic, propelled me back into the kitchen. My grandmother had taken a seat and was now preparing to watch me defeat the clog.

  I had noticed, a few times while going under the sink to fetch a rag to wipe the floor, that there was a device back there that looked like a thick, coiled wire, which I thought might be a sink implement of some kind. I took it out now. It was a coiled wire with a kind of winding mechanism. This was the snake: you stuck it in the sink and wound it until it came up against your clog. But the kitchen sink drain was covered by a metal grate that was soldered to the sink bottom—I couldn’t get the snake in there. Was there another way in? I went, again, under the sink. The water drained into the wall through segmented plastic pipes. There was a pipe running straight down from the sink, which connected to a U-shaped pipe, which in turn connected to a pipe that ran into the wall. Three pipes in all. But why would they make the water travel through a U—that is, down and then up again—before going into the wall? Maybe that was the problem—the U was blocked? At least the U looked like it would come off; it was attached to the other two pipes with round coupling nuts. I tried them. Lefty loosey—they turned. I undid one nut, and the U-shaped segment detached, ever so slightly, from the pipe going into the wall. Now I unscrewed the other nut—and just like that the U-shaped pipe came off! Suddenly a cascade of water came down onto me from the sink pipe—I jumped back and out of the space and spilled water from the U-shaped pipe. The water was nasty, brackish. I took my U-shaped pipe and dumped it in the toilet. Then I came back and started rounding up rags to clean up the spill.

  My grandmother was aghast. “How horrible!” she said. “How terrible. What are we going to do? We’re finished. Are we finished?”

  I tried not to lose my cool. After all, my grandmother wasn’t wrong. I was covered in filth and I had just dismembered the sink without any clear plan of action. I was ignorant of plumbing. I was ignorant of the entire physical world! I lived in an apartment, but how had they built this apartment? What materials were in it? Why did it keep out the cold? How did heat enter it? How did water? And where did the water from the sink go after it made it through those plastic pipes?

  “Andryush,” said my grandmother, “should we cancel the party?”

  I looked at my worried grandmother. She had stopped dressing up at home and mostly wore her worn-out pink robe. But she still wanted to have a party, I could see this. “We’re OK,” I lied. “I know what I’m doing. Give me an hour, OK? If I don’t fix this in an hour, we can cancel the party.”

  My grandmother agreed and went to lie down in her room. I returned to the sink.

  I had been reading Marx—a man who tried
to examine every minute piece of socioeconomic detail in order to discover the laws whereby capitalist society functioned. But was there a Marx of the physical world? There was, actually: Newton. In the seventeenth century, Newton had discovered the basic laws of motion: inertia, gravity, every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Where previously people had simply seen things fall, now they could understand why they fell. In fact it was less that Newton was the Marx of the physical world than that Marx was trying to be the Newton of the social world. Had he succeeded? Maybe not. The laws of economics were more complicated than the laws of motion.

  I considered calling Yulia to ask her if she knew anything about sinks, but it was my sense that she did not know anything about sinks. And Sergei was probably teaching a class somewhere. Not that he would know much about sinks. Of the Octobrists, Nikolai would have the best chance of knowing about sinks, but calling him now would be an implicit promise to help him again with his stupid dacha; also I had not invited him to the party. But I wiped my hands on a towel and dialed his number. He did not pick up. I went back to the sink.

  The simplest thing would have been if the U was clogged. I had spilled water out of it but that didn’t mean there wasn’t a clog in there. I looked inside and saw darkness. I took the U into the bath and poured some water into it from the lower faucet—the water went into the U and very quickly started coming out the other side. The U was not clogged.

  I returned to the kitchen only to find my grandmother going through her little phone book. “Andryush,” she said, “we have to call everyone and tell them not to come.”

  “Why?” I said.

  “Well, look!” she said, indicating the sink.

  The area around the sink was terrifying—filthy rags soaked in water, a mess of cleaning products and old plastic bags, the little red doors under the sink opened to reveal that someone had torn apart the pipes. I could see why my grandmother might think we weren’t ready to receive guests.

  “You said you’d give me an hour. Only twenty minutes have passed. I can fix this.”

  I shooed her back to her room. Then I put our deepest saucepan under the sink, poured some water into a glass, and started pouring it down the drain. It appeared without delay on the other end of the pipe and splashed into my saucepan. So there was nothing wrong with the sink or its pipe, and there was nothing wrong with the U-pipe.

  That left the pipe sticking into the wall. I took my glass with water and angled some into that pipe. In it went, but I could not see the other side. The other side was—I had no idea where. Outdoors? Under the apartment?

  I mean, both. The answer had to be both. The pipes must have been in between the walls and the floors, eventually connecting to a larger pipe under the street. That was the only possibility. And the pipes from the street went—I did not know. That was beyond my pay grade. Into the river? It didn’t matter. I just had to clear this one clog.

  I stuck the snake into the wall pipe and started turning the handle. At first there was no resistance and then there was a little, but I kept turning the handle and my wire went deeper. Had I cleared the clog? Or were these bends in the pipe? I suspected bends and kept going. I was shocked at the length of the wire—there was no way to know just how quickly I was uncoiling it, and I couldn’t of course measure, but it must have extended more than fifteen feet. And then it ran into something that stopped it cold, a wall of some kind, or a rock. At first I thought that this was it: the end of the pipe. If this was the end of the pipe, and I had not yet met the clog, then I was up against a mystery. Or else I had simply cleared it and not really noticed—that’s how strong the snake was. I started withdrawing the snake; I’d have to put the pipes back together and test the sink again.

  Except what would it mean for the pipe to end? I stopped withdrawing the snake. The pipe couldn’t end. If the pipe ended, where would the water go? No, our pipe must have cleared into a larger pipe, which eventually cleared into an even larger pipe, out on the street, like I said. That’s the only way this thing could have kept going.

  If my snake had entered a larger pipe, why would it have stopped? No. I started turning my snake again in the old, forward direction, until it returned to the rock. This time I kept going. If there was a rock in my pipe, I needed to get it out of the way. And as I turned the snake, I felt, or thought I felt, that the rock was moving. I might also have been twisting without effect. And yet it felt like something was happening.

  I kept turning and by now I was convinced, although at times it seemed immovable, that this was not a rock, but a clog. My clog. A coil of hair and vegetables and shampoo and kasha. As I pressed against it I imagined what it looked like, this coil of hair and kasha; I was amazed that any water had managed to penetrate it at all, but then again water has its ways, and also, actually, the whole point was that it had stopped penetrating it. That’s why I was here.

  And then suddenly it felt like my clog had fallen into space and my snake was free. I turned the handle a few more times but it was unnecessary. The clog was gone! I just knew it. Motherfucking clog! I wished I had been able to see its face as it fell into the larger pipe, to be swept into a river, and then eventually an ocean. Or whatever. Fuck you, clog! My only regret is that I didn’t look upon your ugly face.

  I reassembled the pipes under the sink, turned on the water, and watched it drain. I had never been so impressed; the simple draining of water in a sink had never looked to me so elegant.

  “Babushka!” I said. My grandmother was in her room and when I went in there to get her, she was looking out the window into the courtyard. “Babushka, let me show you something.” I led her back to the kitchen.

  “Oh, my God!” she cried after seeing the mess on the floor, which I hadn’t yet cleaned up.

  “No, look,” I said, and I turned the water on. It drained perfectly.

  I was worried that she’d forgotten about the whole thing and was going to ask what I was showing her, but she hadn’t. “You fixed it?” she said.

  I nodded.

  “I knew you would,” she said, and went back to her room.

  A little while later my phone rang. It was Nikolai.

  “What’s up?” he said.

  “Oh, nothing. I wanted to consult you about a plumbing issue. But I fixed it.”

  “You fixed the plumbing?”

  “I did.”

  “Good for you,” said Nikolai. There was a pause. I sensed that he knew that there was a party, and that I hadn’t invited him. So I invited him.

  “I’d be glad to come,” said Nikolai.

  Soon Seraphima Mikhailovna came and cooked a monumental feast. Then the guests started arriving. Emma Abramovna came, with her caretaker; and the soldiers, plus Howard’s very nice and pretty girlfriend; and the Octobrists. My linemates Anton and Oleg represented the hockey guys; I hadn’t realized until they filled up my grandmother’s ancient apartment just how big they were. The party was not without its ticklish moments. Misha demanded of Oleg what he did for a living, and when Oleg answered that he was in real estate, Misha asked if that meant he sucked the marrow from the life of the city. “That’s right,” said Oleg happily.

  Misha was momentarily flustered by Oleg’s amorality, and then just raised his glass to him: “You are my enemy and you know it.” They got along great after that. There was plenty of alcohol at the party, and plenty of food; I hadn’t realized it before but Anton and Katya were both single, and at the end of the night he asked for her number.

  For dinner we set everything up in the back room and put my grandmother in a spot from which she wouldn’t be able to get up and try to fetch people things. She accepted this. I worried that she would start hinting to Emma Abramovna about her dacha, and everyone would see how her oldest friend evaded her, but she never brought it up. Periodically she would ask, when there was a quiet moment, “Whose party is this?” At first it was worrisome, but then
it almost seemed like she was teasing us.

  “It’s your party!” we said, and she said, “My party?” and we said yes. “All right,” she agreed. She stayed with us until the guests left, at close to midnight, and then declared, as she watched Yulia and me finish the cleanup, that we were never having guests again, it was too exhausting. But she said it in a triumphant sort of way.

  3.

  I LAND AN INTERVIEW

  THEN IN MID-MAY, a couple of weeks after my grandmother’s party, I got an incredible bit of news. The Slavic Review had accepted my paper on Sergei’s radical reeducation program. I sent a short note about this to the Watson College hiring committee. The cochair of the committee (alongside my old almost-employer Richard Sutherland), a German professor at Watson named Constanza Kotz, wrote back right away that this was good news and could I send the paper? I did so. Professor Kotz then wrote again to say that the committee would like to add me to the short list of candidates and could I send some dates when I would be available to come for a campus visit and interview? If I could not make it in person, Kotz suggested that we could get it done over Skype. She added, in a private note, that the committee had been impressed by my commitment to teaching and my previous contributions to Watson College but had been worried by my lack of publications. They still had this worry but a little less so, given the Slavic Review acceptance, and looked forward to meeting me in person, or over Skype, as the case may be.

  I was at the windowsill when I received the email and I jumped up from my chair—it was easier to do than from a normal sitting position, since I was already astride the chair—and pumped my fist like I had just won a great victory. I sort of had. I owed it all to Sergei and October. We didn’t have hockey that night, but we did the next night, and I couldn’t wait to thank him in person.

  But first I saw Yulia, and she did not feel about it quite the way that I did.

  “So you used Sergei and the rest of us to get a job interview in America,” she said.