A Terrible Country

by Keith Gessen

  In the evenings she still enjoyed our Soviet films. Sometimes Yulia, who remained our main source for tips on what to watch, joined us. Other times I saw her later. She slept over a fair amount now, and my grandmother seemed to find this arrangement congenial. It was as if she were sprouting a new family.

  But in the late afternoon hours, after lunch, she spoke of suicide. “You know,” she said one day, over tea, “I asked one of the pharmacists to give me poison. I even gave her the money. But now she won’t do it.”

  “What? Who?”

  “The pharmacist.”

  “Where?”

  “Over there.” She motioned outdoors.

  “What kind of poison?” I said.

  “I asked her for something that would kill me. She said she had something like that.”

  I couldn’t tell if this had actually happened. I imagined myself showing up at the pharmacy and demanding to know, through the glass, if they had promised to poison my grandmother.

  “In one of the European countries there is a place you can go,” my grandmother went on, “a house, you can go to the house and if you want to die, they will help you.”

  She was talking about physician-assisted suicide, euthanasia. It was practiced in the Netherlands. Perhaps she had seen a segment about it on the news.

  “Isn’t that nice?” she went on. “If you want to go, you can go.”

  I no longer argued with her about these things. I agreed with her that it was nice. Sadly, I suggested, the same was not possible here.

  “No,” my grandmother agreed. “It’s not.”

  My grandmother dreamed of killing herself. Her doctor had said there was no safe way for her to take anti-depressants, so I tried to give her some Saint-John’s-wort tea. But she had a bad reaction: it made her hyper and paranoid. She woke up several times in the middle of the night and told me she thought she heard noises outside her window. I had to come and sit in the armchair next to her bed while she slept. I threw out the Saint-John’s-wort. She remained depressed. I felt like she was asking me to kill her, and I could not do it.

  A better person might have done it. A better or more courageous person. I was beginning to think that maybe I was not that better or more courageous person. I had become a slightly better person here. I had stopped looking at Facebook quite so much; I had become less bitterly jealous of all my classmates. I was being nice to Yulia, and, aside from refusing to strangle my grandmother with a pillow, I was being a decent friend to her. But compared to the vastly better person I had hoped to become, this wasn’t much to speak of. And I could always go back to being the person I was before. In fact all it would take would probably be a return to the United States.

  I had even begun to have my doubts about Yulia. I didn’t want to have them, but I did. She too was a little depressed. And incredibly sensitive. I wasn’t sure I could handle being in the constant presence of someone so morally acute. I wasn’t sure I could live up to it. I was sure, in fact, that I could not.

  More to the point, would I really be able to stay in Moscow indefinitely? On the one hand it was appealing. I didn’t care that much about good coffee. And I liked the food. But the daily grind of life was something else. Just to do anything—to get my skates sharpened, to get a library book, to get from one part of the city to another—was an unbelievable hassle. What in New York took twenty minutes, here took an hour. What in New York took an hour, here took pretty much all day. It wore you down. The frowns on the faces of the people wore you down. The lies on the television too, after a while, wore you down.

  Sometimes in the evenings as she was going to bed my grandmother asked me to sit with her while she read. She would lie in her little twin bed, her glasses on her nose, and hold up a thin sheaf of pages she’d torn from one of her books, while I sat in the armchair by her bed and read whatever I was reading then. Eventually she would fall asleep, I would gently remove her glasses, pull her blanket over her, and turn off the light. One night that spring she fell asleep and for a while I sat in my chair and wondered if I should do it. My grandmother was in pain—not physical pain, though a bit of that, but emotional pain. She was bored, she felt useless, she was sad. She lay with her mouth hanging open, her teeth out, my grandmother, the mother of my mother, lightly snoring. She had a pillow under her knees, which I could remove without waking her and then press over her face—I had already removed her glasses—and perhaps if I did it gently enough she would not even wake up. This is what she wanted above all, not to wake up! “Leva just went to sleep one night” was something she said a lot about Uncle Lev. “He just went to sleep and died.” But of course she’d wake up if I tried to suffocate her with a pillow. I pictured her fighting me instinctively, even as intellectually she wanted the end to come. And then what exactly would I tell the police? That she asked me to do it? I pictured the baby-faced policeman I’d talked to when my grandmother was missing—would he be understanding? Should I try to bribe him? Or would that be an implicit admission of guilt?

  It didn’t matter. I wasn’t going to do it. I didn’t have it in me. A better person would have done it, I think. I bet Sergei would have done it. He had told me the other day that he was finally leaving his wife. “It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” he said. “But it’s better this way.” He couldn’t lie, was his problem. And I felt like if an elderly person, a little grandmother, in pain, had asked him to kill her, he would have done it. Yet I could not.

  I was beginning to wonder if I had promised more to the people around me than I could deliver. If I had made myself out to be a better person than I could be. I couldn’t shake the occasional feeling that I was in over my head.

  5.

  PROMISES

  AND YET, AND YET, and yet. I loved it. I loved kasha and kotlety and I loved the language and I loved the hockey guys and I even loved some of the people on the street. I loved walking down Sretenka with my hockey gear in my Soviet backpack, taking the subway one stop, emerging at Prospekt Mira and then walking to the stadium past the McDonald’s, the Orthodox church, the market where we failed to buy my grandmother slippers, and then into the rink. Late at night, on my way home, I loved sometimes buying half a chicken from the Azeri guys. “Our hockey friend!” they always said, greeting me. On nights when I went to see Yulia, I loved taking a car for three dollars—a flat one hundred rubles, who could argue. One time I caught a car home from her place, up the Garden Ring, at two in the morning. The driver was in his early twenties, of indeterminate ethnicity. When I got in the car he took his mobile phone from the radio slot, in case I was a cop or something, but once I was seated he put it back in again, and as we picked up speed on the Garden Ring I saw that it was playing a film—300, I think, about the Spartan battle with the Persians in 480 B.C. We raced down the Garden Ring, my driver and I, occasionally looking up at the road, occasionally looking down at the Spartans in chroma-key, holding off Xerxes’ army.

  One night in early June, Yulia decided to have a dinner party. She invited the Marxist reading group and two of her friends from her graduate program, who were not Marxists. On the way over I walked down to the fancy grocery store next to the KGB. They had a whole huge section devoted to vodka. This was a stereotype about Russians, most of whom preferred beer most of the time, but it was also true: in addition to beer, they liked vodka. It was a matter of geography. It was too cold in Russia to grow grapes; it was too dry to age whiskey deliciously in barrels. And so Russians, like Finns and Swedes and Poles, drank a clear, wheat- or potato-based liquor. That is to say, they drank vodka. In the fancy supermarket next to the KGB the vodka section ran the gamut from insanely cheap to moderately cheap. The government kept the vodka tariffs low because they knew that if vodka became too expensive, people would start making it in their bathtubs and dying. From the cheapest to the most expensive, the vodka bottles were clear, and the light of the store refracted through them as through crystals, and I walke
d through the aisle, choosing my vodka, like Superman in that chamber on Krypton where the tribal elders used to meet before their planet was destroyed. Once I picked out my vodka I also got some high-quality herring. The whole thing ran me fifteen dollars. “Having a party?” the middle-aged cashier, her hair dyed red, said to me as she scanned my items.

  “Just meeting up with some friends,” I said.

  “Bon appétit.”

  “Thank you.”

  I left the store in a state of near exaltation. I had never had such a pleasant interaction with a Russian cashier. But in recent weeks I’d had such interactions more and more. I thought, perhaps, that when I’d first arrived they’d smelled fear on me, and worry, and displacement. I had shed it now. I was an émigré. I had left. Now I’d returned. The night before, at hockey, Oleg had come off the ice looking annoyed after I flubbed a pass to him from the corner—but the fact was that I’d had to fight off two defenders from the white team and I still had Grisha draped on my back when I made the pass.

  “Andrei,” said Oleg, “what was up with that pass?”

  “Oleg, fuck your mother!” I cried, finally losing it. “Stop making a long face all the time! Play hockey! If the puck doesn’t come to you, go get it, you lazy fuck!”

  I was mildly horrified by my own outburst, especially as Oleg had been having a rough time recently—the guys he was renting to, about whom the rest of the team had warned him, had stopped paying their rent and declared that they were going to take over the space as their own—but after I swore at him Oleg just laughed.

  “Antosha,” he said, turning to Anton. “Did you hear that? Andrei’s yelling just like us now!”

  I felt very proud. Now, coming out of the supermarket, I decided to hail a car—I was running late, the streets were clear, and there wasn’t a good subway to catch from where I was to reach Yulia’s. I got a car quickly and sat down in the front seat. My driver was from the Caucasus somewhere (most of the guys who picked you up at this point, although they drove Russian cars, were not Russian—they were from the poorer countries south of Russia), and as we reached Pushkin Square he turned to me and said, “Where you from? Argentina?”

  It was a question that had freaked me out when I first arrived. Now I just said, “I’m from here.” Which was true. “But I’m Jewish.”

  “Oh, yeah?” said the cabdriver. “I’m Jewish too. Ever hear of the mountain Jews of Georgia?”

  I had not.

  “We’ve been there thousands of years,” he said. Then he asked, “You know Yiddish?”

  “No.”

  “I do. They taught us there, up in the mountains.”

  “Wow,” I said, and meant it.

  I was in a great mood when I showed up at Yulia’s. It was past ten already but that was all right. Russians keep late hours. They think nothing of starting dinner at ten o’clock. Especially now that the air was a little warmer and the sun set later in the day.

  Dinner had not yet been served. People were out on the balcony, smoking and drinking beer. Yulia was wearing her pretty white cotton dress with flowers on it. She kissed me hello and directed me to the balcony. Out there Sergei was talking about a new branch of October that had started up in Saratov. “The comrades from Saratov,” he called them. Apparently the comrades from Saratov came from the antifa movement, which spent some of its time engaging in street fights with neo-Nazis, and though this group had decided to go socialist they had brought some of their old ways with them to October. “If it wasn’t for all the knife fighting,” Sergei summed up, “the comrades from Saratov would be worth their weight in gold.” After breaking up with his wife he had moved back in with his parents, and he seemed quite happy.

  Yulia had gone into the kitchen after taking me to the balcony and she now called everyone in to eat.

  Yulia tended to make up for a lack of quality in her cooking with volume. She and her roommates, some of whom were superior cooks, had made potatoes and kotlety and salad and even cabbage pie. We drank the vodka I brought—everyone else had brought wine or beer—and pronounced various toasts.

  At some point people started talking about whether they’d leave the country.

  “I would, I think,” said Misha. “Academically there’s only so much I can accomplish here. If I want to do serious work I need to go to Germany or Britain or the U.S. But I’d hope to come back eventually.”

  “Like Lenin,” said Boris.

  Everyone laughed. That was the consensus, it seemed—people were willing to leave temporarily, but they intended, like Lenin, to return. I waited for Yulia to say something—I wondered if she’d take a different position, in this context, than she did with me. But she remained silent.

  “I’m not leaving,” said Sergei. “I associate my fate with the fate of this country. No matter what.”

  “Even if Putin comes back?” Katya asked. She meant if he came back as president. There was a sense—not really shared by the Octobrists, but Katya was not in October—that the Medvedev regime was more liberal, and a return to Putin would put an end to that.

  “No matter what,” Sergei reiterated.

  The table went silent. Sergei had said it very matter-of-factly, without undue drama, and still it had the effect of making everyone else feel that their attachment to Russia was inadequate.

  “I feel the same,” Yulia said quietly.

  The table was silent again, even more awkwardly now. I felt that people were looking at me, as if at this dinner party Yulia was breaking up with me. And in a way she was doing just that. I was from America, in the end. If she wasn’t going to leave Russia, then that meant we were kaput.

  Unless.

  “OK,” I said, speaking to her (I was right next to her), but also to the table. “Then I’m not leaving either.”

  There was a momentary pause and then everyone laughed. We drank to me staying. Yulia kissed me on the cheek. “Don’t be an idiot,” she whispered to me.

  “I don’t want to go anywhere without you,” I said.

  She kissed me again.

  And I meant it. These were my people. Fuck America. I would stay.

  6.

  SUMMERTIME

  THAT SUMMER WAS MAGICAL. The weather just got warmer and warmer, to the point where it was maybe too warm, but that was OK—people simply walked around in shorts and flip-flops and took things slow. I loved walking to hockey in the heat, cooling off on the ice, and then reemerging into the summer. After hockey, Sergei would drop me off at Trubnaya and I would buy a Zhigulovskoye and then go sit with my hockey stuff on one of the benches on the boulevard and relax. The Moscow heat was a dry heat, like in Jerusalem. As I sat there I thought of how, back at the hockey rink, the Zamboni driver, in the dark Moscow night, was cutting the ice one last time so that the next day we could have a fresh new sheet. Occasionally on these evenings my phone would buzz in my pocket and it’d be Yulia asking if I wanted to see her. I always did.

  Now that the weather was much better, we got to spend more time outside. It turned out there were yet more cities within the city. The city that I had always seen was a charming old European city that had been defaced and overwritten by Communism. And there was some truth to that. But over the years many of the buildings that would catch the eyes of a common tourist, the old pastel-colored cupcake buildings, had been fixed up and made to look new, whereas the buildings of the early Soviet school, which included Constructivist masterpieces, had been allowed to deteriorate. Walking around with Yulia clued me in to the great utopian experiment that had been attempted here, on the level of the buildings themselves, before it was abandoned and forgotten.

  There was something else that she showed me, not having to do with Communism, exactly. The city that I knew was the city of avenues and side streets. The avenues were enormous highways; the side streets were quiet and rambling. But in between the side streets were the courtyards.
You could go in, sit on a bench, drink a beer. I had seen people doing this in our own courtyard, and found it, mostly, annoying. But now that Yulia and I did it, or Yulia and I and Misha and Masha or Sergei, it was great. There were courtyards near my grandmother’s place, off Pechatnikov, that were quiet and almost ancient-seeming; the buildings around them had peeling pastel paint, and there were old trees, and in a few places people had tried to plant some flowers. None of the courtyards were beautiful or particularly well kept, but I saw now they had a beauty to them; they were leftover oases inside the giant metropolis. And gradually, even in the time that I was there, they were being wiped out: as the old buildings on Pechatnikov were knocked down and replaced with near exact replicas of themselves, the new owners always made sure to install sturdy gates, so that only the wealthy residents would be allowed in. The city was closing itself off from itself. But for now at least there were still places you could go.

  The warm weather was good for our political activity as well. October started running its “Street University,” where various speakers would come and give a brief talk somewhere out in the open—the idea was less to attract random passersby than just to claim public space for public discussions. And also the general pace of our meetings, protests, and other activities increased, and we finally launched our website—Yulia organized a small party at Falanster to celebrate—and there were more things for me to translate, for which I was glad.

  The thaw in the weather accompanied a political thaw of sorts. Medvedev was slightly more liberal than Putin, but the real change was that the spigot of oil money had finally run dry. World oil prices collapsed in the wake of the global financial crisis. In Russia, after ten years of sometimes astounding economic growth, the economy slipped into recession. You could fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but as the weather grew warmer and the economy still hadn’t improved, the ruble had lost value but salaries had not been adjusted for inflation—well, it was as if some kind of lid had been lifted. In one Siberian oil town, workers whose wages hadn’t been adjusted for inflation in an entire year—during a time when the ruble had lost 20 percent of its value against the dollar, meaning that they had to swallow what was in effect a 20 percent wage cut—started organizing against their employer, good old RussOil. The head of their organizing committee was arrested and thrown in jail, supposedly for having a bag of heroin on him. When the organizing didn’t stop, another leader of the movement was beaten to within an inch of his life. When the workers walked out in protest, they were set upon by security, who proceeded to beat the shit out of them with baseball bats. Someone took a grainy cell-phone video, and Misha sent it around to our email list: it was surreal to see these Russian guys with baseball bats attacking a group of workers. The situation was so bad that Putin himself got involved and demanded that the wages be indexed. RussOil grudgingly complied.