A Terrible Country

by Keith Gessen

  The next day Yulia took me around the city; she showed me the Maidan, where people had massed together to form the Orange Revolution in 2004, and the huge old churches on the hills above it, and finally the house-museum of Mikhail Bulgakov, whom Yulia loved. “He wasn’t a socialist,” she said, “and he didn’t like Jews. But he was a good writer and a pretty good person. That counts.”

  Kiev was a more naturally beautiful city than Moscow, and also a calmer one. Five million people lived there but you never felt hurried or rushed. It was much poorer too. Ukraine had few natural resources and had fumbled the post-Soviet transition. For a visitor, this meant everything was cheap. We walked around the church grounds and ate ice cream. Yulia seemed happy and relaxed here in a way she rarely did in Moscow.

  I felt like she was trying to tell me something by bringing me to Kiev, introducing me to her mother, showing me around. Perhaps she was saying, “This is why I can’t leave. It would be cowardly to do so.” Or perhaps she was saying, “This is serious. You know everything about me now. Make a move.” Sitting in the chicken place listening to her talk about her childhood, then walking among the thirteenth-century churches on the hill above the city center, then in her favorite bar, the Kupidon, where I drank a giant Ukrainian beer, I kept thinking that I should propose to her that we bind our lives together. Maybe Sophia Nikolaevna could move to Moscow. She and my grandmother could keep each other company. Or maybe we should all move to Kiev. We could live like kings in impoverished Kiev. I kept thinking in all these spots of how to phrase it, and if I should phrase it, and guessing what she’d say.

  But I didn’t do it. I was in part still wondering if there might not be some job opening that could happen, some stroke of luck—I wanted to prove to Yulia and my grandmother and myself that I wasn’t a failure, that I could provide for all of us in some other way than by selling off my grandmother’s old apartment. So I waited. And waited. And then things took on a momentum of their own.

  * * *

  • • •

  The highlight of the summer was our trip to Nikolai’s dacha. There had been some delays and cost overruns, but by mid-July it was done. Nikolai spent a week there in triumph, and then turned it over, for a week, to us.

  There was no way we were going to force my grandmother to take the hell journey to the dacha on public transportation, so I borrowed Sergei’s rickety old Lada. Then I had to drive. I had never driven in Moscow before, and it was terrifying. It was not just that it was a big city. It was a tremendously confusing one. The side streets were narrow; the radial avenues were enormous; on certain long stretches of the major avenues traffic lights had been eliminated, making it basically impossible to turn left. On my first drive home from hockey, where Sergei had handed me the keys to the car, I missed my left turn onto Tsvetnoi Boulevard from the Garden Ring and then could not figure out how to pull a U-turn. I tried once to take a right and another right and another so as to return to the Ring and take a left, sending me back where I came from, but I ended up in the wrong lane and had to take a right again. Finally I decided it would be easier to just remain on the Garden Ring and go all the way around. It was late and traffic was relatively light and it only took forty minutes to get back to Tsvetnoi Boulevard again and take my damn left.

  The other factor I encountered, once we had packed the car with our stuff and my grandmother, was that the cars were going at different speeds. In New York most cars are as aggressive as they can be; once you get used to this, you can anticipate it. In Moscow drivers were equally aggressive, but it was hard to anticipate exactly how it would play out in practice because cars had different capabilities. There were plenty of Mercedeses and Audis—these cars were quick. On the other end of the spectrum were old Russian cars, like mine—these cars had limited acceleration. And in between were newer Russian cars, some of which looked like they’d be able to accelerate, but in fact could not. So while everyone wanted to be a daredevil/asshole, not everyone could go at the same speed, and this added a layer of complexity to an already difficult situation.

  Somehow we arrived at the dacha without incident. I hadn’t been there in a few weeks and Nikolai had clearly continued to improve it. The main thing was that he’d cleared out the yard. The weeds and overgrowth were gone, leaving a clearing, not yet quite covered with grass, and a few select bushes that had a bit more shape to them. My grandmother, upon seeing one, immediately said, “Raspberries!” She was right. She approached it and started pulling down raspberries and eating them.

  And thus we spent the week. There was a cot on the first floor where my grandmother could sleep so she didn’t have to tackle the stairs, and while the tiny grocery store was a little too far to walk, we were able to drive there every morning and pick up what we needed—they had potatoes, beets, cabbage, and bread. Every other day a local farmer set up a small fruit and vegetable stand outside the store, where we got tomatoes, cucumbers, and some greens. Finally, at Nikolai’s suggestion, Yulia and I drove out about an hour one day to a village where we were able to go door-to-door and buy eggs. We had to go door-to-door because the most eggs we could buy from any one person was two. That seemed to be all they had. But we kept going until we had twenty eggs. One woman also sold us some cottage cheese. Between the two of us, and with conceptual input from my grandmother, we were able to make enough food to feed us, and everyone was satisfied.

  For all of Nikolai’s heroics there was no changing the fact that the house was in the middle of nowhere. We did not wake to the sound of a babbling brook or the fresh smell of dewy trees and grass taking in the morning sun. But we were also not in Moscow. One of the neighbors apparently also kept chickens, because in the early mornings we were roused by the sounds of a rooster. The first time it happened, I found Yulia already lying awake, smiling. “My dear,” she said, “we’re not in Moscow anymore.” This was a quote from an old Soviet anecdote about an American family that comes to the Soviet Union on a trip from Chicago, and whose young daughter keeps complaining about the accommodations, to which her parents reply, “My dear, we’re not in Chicago anymore.” But also it was true. We were not in Moscow anymore. And that meant we were on vacation.

  Nikolai had set up the house with wi-fi so in the mornings Yulia and I were able to work. (I had taken on three summer PMOOCs; the U.S. economy was still in recession but partly for that reason there was less of a PMOOC drop-off than expected.) Then in the afternoons we would go for a walk to the abandoned quarry. My grandmother wasn’t up for these walks but she remained content to sit in the backyard wearing her old wide-brimmed summer hat and occasionally getting up to feed herself raspberries from the seemingly inexhaustible raspberry bush. One morning Yulia and I woke up and stumbled into the kitchen and my grandmother was already out in the yard, picking raspberries. She had in recent weeks become almost entirely reliant on her cane when she walked, but now she was stretched out to her full height, reaching for raspberries. Yulia said, “She looks like a little bear.”

  I had brought along a whole packet of old Soviet movies on DVD from the DVD pirate kiosk at Clean Ponds, and in the evenings we would watch them together. We watched Office Romance, about a mean lady boss and her nerdy but charming underling, who fall in love; and Five Evenings, a Nikita Mikhalkov film about a man who returns suddenly from unknown parts to spend a week (five evenings) with his old love and her teenage nephew, whose mother died during the war. Though the film was from the 1970s, the director, Mikhalkov, was still alive and active and had become a nasty nationalist, and so Yulia refused to watch it with us and went upstairs. But my grandmother and I were free of such prejudices, and we were not disappointed. The movie centers on the man’s attempts to win back his old love by exerting a manly influence on her rebellious teenager. The film is set in the mid-1950s, and it’s unclear why the man, Sasha, has been away—whether he was imprisoned, or he simply left, or what. His old girlfriend Tamara is wary of him but not actively hostile, whereas the
boy rejects him outright. By the end of the film, Sasha has broken down the boy’s resistance somewhat, and the three of them spend some time together. Still, it is a grim and unrelenting film. In the last scene, Tamara drops her hostility toward Sasha and allows him to fall asleep with his head resting on her lap. We finally learn—it’s possible that to the Soviet audience of its time this would have been obvious from the start—the reason the couple was separated: the war flung them to different parts of the empire, and Sasha has only now managed to make it back. And as he falls asleep on her lap, Tamara, beginning to plan her future with him again, pronounces a kind of prayer. “Just don’t let there be another war,” she says. “Just don’t let there be another war.”

  “Yes,” said my grandmother, when the film ended, “just don’t let there be another war.”

  From her mouth the phrase, which had become, during Soviet times, a kind of slogan, contained so much. Her husband, my grandfather, dying at the front; her parents, forced to evacuate Moscow despite her father’s poor health; in the midst of all this, her pregnancy and the birth of my mother. Just don’t let there be another war: a mixture of terror and hope.

  We were sitting next to each other on the couch that became, with the removal of some pillows, her cot. If her husband, my grandfather, had survived the war, she could have had other children. Or if she’d agreed to remarry sooner than she did. If she’d had other children, one of them could be here now, and she would have had more grandchildren, probably, than just me and Dima. “But you don’t get to say how your life is going to be,” my grandmother said suddenly. And that was also true. On a whim I took her hand in mine. For such a tiny little grandmother she had surprisingly big hands.

  7.

  END OF A BEAUTIFUL ERA

  THAT WAS REALLY the end of it, for me, the last good thing that happened. After we got back from the dacha, things started falling apart.

  One day in late July, Howard rang our buzzer. He looked upset.

  “Tea?” I said.

  “Russians and Brits can have tea in any weather,” he said. “But it’s too hot for me.”

  I had some half-liter Zhigulovskoye beer bottles in the fridge; my grandmother was in her room napping, so we sat in the kitchen and drank those.

  “I need your counsel,” Howard began. “I met a girl online and we set up a date. She was hot. And—”

  “Wait,” I said. “What about the girl from Esquire?”

  “Vera? She was away. But that’s part of it. So, I, uh, this girl was hot. And she had her own place, which is pretty rare.” Howard paused to see if I was still indignant about Vera, or listening. I was listening. “OK, so in retrospect her place seems a little weird, like there wasn’t much in the way of personal stuff. It was kind of anonymous, you know?”

  I nodded.

  “So, um, you know, we hung out and I paid and went home and that was that. Vera came back. I tried to put it out of my mind.

  “And then this guy just fucking cold-calls me. He says, ‘Howard, my name is Vitaly, we need to meet, I have some information about Natasha’—that was her name—‘that I need to share with you.’

  “So I’m a little freaked-out, naturally, but I go to meet this chap for lunch, he’s very nice, he’s well dressed, quiet, says he works for an ‘information consulting agency,’ and he hands me a thumb drive and says, you know, ‘This was sent to us the other day, with your contact information, and we wanted to make you aware of it, in case it wasn’t something you wanted getting out.’

  “And it was a fucking tape of me and Natasha in her room, screwing around!”

  “Ho ho ho!” I cried. “Kompromat! Amazing.”

  “Yes, right? I mean, there are two issues. Or three.”

  “Vera,” I said.

  “Yes, but, actually, she’s quite understanding about that. She knows I’m not the world’s most abstemious person.”

  “OK, but still.”

  “Yes, true.”

  “And the Moscow Times?” I said. I was trying to earn my role as his adviser.

  “Yes, but, actually, I don’t care. I’ve been there three years, and I’m ready to move on. And in terms of being a freelancer, I mean, I’m not saying I’m some kind of sex hero, but if this ever came out, I’d be like a hero, right?”

  It was an actual question. “A sex hero?” I said.

  “Yes, you know, I’m in a sex tape.”

  “OK,” I said. “Let’s suppose.”

  Howard nodded and looked at me expectantly.

  “So Vera forgives you,” I said, “and you’re a sex hero. What’s the problem?”

  “Well, that’s what I wanted to ask you about. I don’t think my friend Vitaly is really from a private information security company, do you?”

  “I guess not,” I said. Howard was implying, not without justification, that he was from the FSB.

  “So I guess I’m wondering, if they’d go to the trouble of doing this, what else might they do?”

  “That’s a good point,” I said.

  Howard had been working on a piece about the tenth anniversary of the Moscow apartment bombings. The bombings had taken place shortly after Putin became prime minister (the first time) and had been blamed, immediately, on Chechen terrorists; in response, Putin launched the Second Chechen War, promising, in a famous early moment of his leadership, to wipe out the Chechen enemy wherever he might hide, even if it were the shitter. The war immediately made him the most popular political figure in Russia and guaranteed his election to the presidency in early 2000. He had not looked back since.

  But over the years questions had been raised about the bombings. The terrorist suspects had never been produced; several of them supposedly died while being apprehended. The Duma tried to convene an independent investigation; two of its members ended up dead. Two former FSB agents who voiced suspicions publicly about possible state involvement in the bombings were arrested; one eventually emigrated, doubled down on his claims, and was poisoned in London by polonium. As time went on, and no further light was shed on the supposed terrorist masterminds of the bombings, more and more people came to suspect, rightly or wrongly, that the government itself had done it.

  “Am I in danger?” Howard asked.

  “How should I know?” I said.

  “I don’t know,” Howard said. “You seem to know Russian history.”

  I did know Russian history, I thought. And it wasn’t good. “I’ll tell you what my grandmother would say,” I said. “She’d say it’s a terrible country and you ought to leave.”

  Howard seemed relieved. “You know,” he said, “I was thinking the exact same thing.”

  A few days later, he came by to bid farewell. He was especially attentive to my grandmother, who seemed quite moved by this and then immediately asked, when he left, “Who was that?” Not long after, someone with very good aim came by and threw a rock through Howard’s bedroom window.

  * * *

  • • •

  Then Oleg got shot. I found out about it from Anton, who found out from Oleg’s wife. Oleg was at a meeting in central Moscow and was getting into his car to go to hockey when a guy in a mask came up to the driver’s side window and started firing. He shot Oleg three times in the torso and then raised the gun to his head. When Oleg saw this he instinctively started falling sideways, onto the passenger-side seat. This saved his life. The bullet entered his head at an angle, only partly entering his brain, and doctors were able to remove it. He survived.

  He was relatively certain that his troublesome tenants were responsible. After they’d declared that they weren’t paying rent, he had tried to negotiate with them, and when that didn’t work out he’d gone to the police. That, apparently, was a mistake.

  The Sklifosovsky emergency clinic where he’d been taken was close to my house, and Anton and I went by there a couple of times before he was f
inally able to see us, about a week after he was shot. His head was bandaged from the surgery, and his speech was slurred—something he said the doctors thought would get better with time—but otherwise he seemed OK and in surprisingly good spirits. He must have figured he was going to die and was pleased not to be dead. He had decided, after the shooting, to go ahead and sign away the property to his bandit tenants. He still had the other property to lease, and plenty of money squirreled away, and he didn’t need this sort of craziness in his life. He thought he might go to Spain for a bit when he was ready to travel. Anton and I agreed this was a good idea. “You guys are going to have to get a new left wing,” Oleg slurred. Anton and I told him not to worry about that, that we would keep his spot for him as long as it took.

  When we walked out together, Anton said, “He’s not going to play hockey again.”

  He was right. Oleg got better and went to Spain, but his hip had taken a bullet and hockey was out.

  * * *

  • • •

  After Oleg got shot I received an email from Dima. The other soldiers had followed Howard out of the country, for their own reasons, and Miklos the arms dealer was going to start working on renovations to his place right away. If we wanted him to buy Grandma’s apartment as well, now would be the time, before he plowed too much money into repairs. I thought about it—Oleg’s getting shot seemed like a bad omen—but I said no again. We weren’t moving Grandma.