A Terrible Country

by Keith Gessen

  “He said maybe, yes,” I said.

  “I knew it,” said Yulia, half to herself.

  “I’m not going to take it,” I said. “If it even exists.”

  “No, Andryush. You will take it.”

  “Yul’,” I said. “What’s going on?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “We’ll see. I could be wrong. I hope I’m wrong. But I’m probably not wrong.

  “Good-bye, Andrei.”

  She kissed me on the cheek, not on the mouth, sort of like she’d kissed me on the cheek when I came into Sergei’s party, but in reverse. It seemed like years had passed since then.

  She opened the door and left. I let her. I was angry and confused. But I was also worried that she was right.

  It was eight o’clock now, I still had time to go to hockey, but I didn’t feel like it. I cleared our plates and played a couple of games of anagrams with my grandmother. Then I answered as many of the emails and messages I’d received as I could. All of it left me feeling uneasy; something had happened back there, and I still didn’t know what it was.

  * * *

  • • •

  The next morning, a Saturday, they arrested Sergei and Misha and charged them with “extremism.” I heard about it from Boris, who called to ask if I knew anything.

  “Blyad’,” I said. “Could it have been because of me? Because of something I said?”

  “I don’t know,” Boris said coldly. “I have no idea what you said or didn’t say. So the answer is: I don’t know.”

  I tried Yulia. She didn’t answer. I kept trying her and she still didn’t answer. Finally I got dressed and went outside and took a car to her place. I called up to their apartment and Katya answered.

  “Yulia doesn’t want to see you,” she said.

  “But she’s there?”

  “Yes, she’s here.”

  I asked her if she knew about the arrests, and she said she did.

  And that was it. I tried Nikolai, whose phone seemed to be off. I called Boris again and asked if he had any news about Nikolai or anyone else; he said he didn’t and also that he didn’t think we should be talking on the phone. I told him I was near Mayakovskaya and asked if he wanted to meet up, and he said no, he didn’t, as if I were some kind of spy.

  I walked down to Patriarch Ponds and sat on one of the benches. This was one of the beautiful spots of Moscow; a small pond inside a small park, with benches and a walkway shaded with old trees, and then all around some old, mostly non-ugly buildings from early in the twentieth century. Yulia and I had come here a few times once the weather was nice enough. There were seldom any really drunk people causing a ruckus here.

  Now it felt useless and sterile and sour. Because of me, two good friends were in jail, and Yulia wouldn’t see me, and even ice-cold, robotic Boris was mad. I felt both wrong and wronged.

  I called Anton, from hockey, and asked if he could meet me. Anton may have been a tax attorney, but that was the closest thing to an attorney I knew. He was at his office, nearby, and half an hour later he met me at the Starlite Diner. I told him what had happened. He didn’t blame me, but he was upset. “We need to tell the guys,” he said. “That’s our goddamn goalie.”

  He got on the phone and soon we had six guys from the hockey game, including Fedya and Grisha from the white team, sitting in the diner with us. Anton and I saw each of them pull up in their Mercedeses and BMWs and park quasi-legally within a convenient distance of the diner. Watching their sleek black cars slowly maneuver into place—“That’s Tolya,” Anton said. “That’s Fedya”—and then watching them enter the diner, in their weekend sweat suits, and all of them bigger than I remembered them, I took a momentary pride in how far I’d come in the past year. That I could convene such a meeting was amazing to me; at the same time, it was also being convened because I had managed to land our goalie in jail. Each of the guys came in, shook hands with everyone around the table, ordered food, and only then heard out Anton and me. Then each of them got on the phone to people they knew. Grisha called his friends in management at RussOil. Fedya and Vanya both had connections in law enforcement. Tolya called some of his banker friends, just in case. Mostly people came up with nothing, but Grisha and Fedya talked to people who were in the know.

  “This is coming from pretty high up,” Grisha reported. “They’re still pissed about the bulldozer in the forest. It’s over my head. I told them we needed a goalie. They said we should visit one of the sports schools.”

  “What’d you say?”

  “I hung up.”

  “Fuck,” said Anton.

  The guys sat for a while longer, trying to think of people to contact, but it was clear that this was their best shot at it, and that once they left the diner, that was it.

  “There’s no one we know who knows someone who could take care of this?” I said.

  “Andrei, I talked to the assistant to the chairman of the company,” Grisha said. “He said the boss has taken a personal interest and wants these guys in jail. That’s the very highest level—it’s way beyond us.”

  He took a bite of his burger.

  “He also said they’re looking to make more arrests. He said there was some girl involved.”

  Oh shit, I thought. Oh no. “Grish,” I said, “listen, that’s Yulia. Remember, she came to one of the games?” Yulia had come to one of the skates and watched from the bleachers; the guys had all been very polite to her. “Can you call your friend back? If Yulia gets arrested, tell him I’m going to the embassy.”

  I didn’t know what I would do if I went to the embassy, but it sounded like the thing to say. Grisha looked thoughtful for a moment and then picked up his phone again—most of the guys still had regular old mobile phones, and Grisha’s looked tiny in his massive hand.

  “Sash, listen,” he said. “That girl you mentioned—that’s the American’s girl. They’re planning on getting married. I think if they pick her up the American’s going to raise hell. It’s going to be a huge pain in the ass . . . Yeah . . . I understand. Just keep it in mind.”

  Grisha hung up and gave me a look that said, “I did what I could. We’ll see what happens.”

  After that, in a subdued and somewhat defeated manner, everyone finished their burgers and, shaking hands all around, took off. Anton and I remained with a heap of uneaten French fries.

  I went outside—I had not developed the Russian habit of holding phone conversations right in front of other people—and called Boris again to tell him that more arrests might be in the offing. “OK,” he said and hung up. I later learned that he took the next train to Kiev. I was unable to reach Nikolai, but he later told me that after hearing about the arrests he’d gone to his dacha for a day, just as he’d once imagined, and then taken a train to Estonia. After trying and failing again to call Yulia I sent her a text warning that more arrests might be coming.

  She wrote back this time. “I’m not going anywhere,” she said.

  I was elated to hear from her, but it was nothing she hadn’t said to me a dozen times. And when I tried calling her again she did not pick up. I went back inside the diner to join Anton.

  “Andrei,” he said, “don’t take it into your head. It’s not your fault. Sergei knew what he was doing.”

  “Thank you,” I said. And I was thankful. But it didn’t change the fact that this was all my fault.

  * * *

  • • •

  That evening, I got a call from Phil Nelson. We’d spoken very briefly once or twice during my time at the university, but he greeted me like an old friend. He said he’d always been very impressed with my work and that he loved my Slavic Review article (which he could not possibly have seen), and then just as my adviser had predicted he offered me a job. He had been thinking for a while, he said, that the university needed to start thinking systematically about the historical experience of
the Gulag, both in Soviet Russia and other places, and given my research interests, as well as my recent brush with Russian totalitarianism, how would I like to be the inaugural chair of Gulag Studies at our great university?

  I had expected the call, though not in all its crazy details, and I had hoped my instinct would be to say no. But it wasn’t. My instinct was to say yes. I tried to put it off. “I’ve got a lot of stuff,” I said meekly, “a lot of projects, under way here right now.”

  “Sure, of course!” said Nelson. “I think we could do a fifteen-thousand-dollar research budget to help you get back and forth a bit. Would that work?”

  Jesus, would it work. I could fly back every other week, practically.

  I was trying to formulate some response to this, but Nelson must have mistaken my silence for toughness, because he said, “And look, now that we’re talking numbers, how would one hundred be to start? That’s not including health insurance and other benefits.”

  I was speechless. Most people I knew made sixty-five or seventy. But he wasn’t done.

  “And look, I know it’s tough to find a place in New York when you’re in Moscow, so let me see if we can come up with some housing for you. It might be in the new construction, but you’ll still be able to walk to campus.” The university had recently completed some new buildings in the East Village. He was offering me housing and I didn’t even have to ask for it. I gave a small laugh of disbelief, which I think Nelson understood correctly to be a surrender.

  He decided not to press his advantage. “So how about this,” he said. “Take a day, walk around the block a couple of times and noodle it over, and we’ll talk again tomorrow, all right? I think we can come to terms.”

  And he hung up. The next day he called again, confirming his offer of a one-bedroom apartment in the new building near Astor Place. After everything I’d said and thought about the inequities of the academic job market; after all the progress I’d made here on starting a new life; after all my promises of how I’d never leave my grandmother behind; after all that, and much more, when it finally came time for me to act on my supposed convictions, I did not. I took the job and the research funding and the apartment.

  Having done so, I did not have to sell my grandmother’s apartment. I now had a salary and could contribute to paying for a caretaker, as I’d said I would. For all his bluster, Dima wouldn’t actually have sold it without me. But I no longer had a moral leg to stand on. Dima had to leave our grandmother because they were readying a case against him. Whereas I left of my own free will. Who was I to tell Dima he couldn’t sell if he needed the money? Here, as in other things, I took the easy way out. I wrote my brother from the windowsill: “I’m ready to sell.”

  It took all of twenty seconds for him to write me back. “Finally!!!!” he said.

  And that was that. Miklos came by the next day and offered two eighty. We accepted. I asked Seraphima Mikhailovna if, once we found a new place, she’d be willing to come live with our grandmother. She said yes.

  * * *

  • • •

  Miklos said he’d be working on Dima’s place for at least another month, so if we wanted to take that long to move our grandmother, we could. But I didn’t want to. I wanted to get it done and over with. I had ten days before my visa expired, and I spent the first days looking for an apartment in our neighborhood with a real estate agent recommended by Anton. But nothing worked. Most of the buildings near us were old, and though the apartments I was looking at had been remodeled, there were no elevators, and all sorts of stairs for my grandmother to fall down. Finally Dima heard of a place through a friend; it was in a quiet neighborhood across the river, it had a balcony for my grandmother to sit on, and most of all it had an elevator. The rent was just fifteen hundred dollars a month. Dima needed a hundred thousand out of the apartment sale for his legal fees, which meant that we had one eighty left over; if we paid Seraphima Mikhailovna one thousand, and budgeted another thousand for everything else, we didn’t have to worry about any Grandma expenses for the next four years. We took the apartment, and three days later Dima flew in to help with my grandmother’s move.

  Once again he stayed in our room, and in virtual silence we packed up my grandmother’s books, her clothes, all the photos and little knickknacks, her medicine, her letters. We told our grandmother that she would be moving temporarily while this apartment underwent renovations, and she accepted this, then forgot, then accepted it, then forgot, then accepted it again. It took three long, miserable, hot days to pack the apartment into boxes, and at the end of it two guys came with a small but adequate flatbed truck, and while the driver sat in the truck and smoked, his partner helped us load my grandmother’s stuff, including all the furniture from her room, so we could basically re-create it verbatim in her new bedroom. Then we went. We thought it would take us two or three trips, but all our grandmother’s stuff fit onto the flatbed, and we managed in just one. Seraphima Mikhailovna was already at the apartment, and after unloading the truck I left her and Dima to unpack and went back to our place to keep our grandmother company in the now almost empty apartment. She was sitting on the lone remaining chair in the kitchen when I got back, looking through her phone books. Instead of waiting in that ravaged apartment, we went outside for a walk and sat in one of the neighboring courtyards and took in the sun. It was still the middle of the afternoon. Eventually my phone rang; it was Dima, who had returned in the small Nissan he’d rented at the airport, and it was time to go.

  I sat in the back, my grandmother in front, and Dima drove. It was a ten-minute drive, but it was far too long. Coming out of our courtyard onto the boulevard, Dima had to turn right, and as we went down the hill toward Trubnaya, for a second a vista of Moscow opened up before us—the golden steeples sparkling in the sun, a few glass towers, and the blue sky over the city. “Ah,” said my grandmother, “how beautiful! Look!” she said to both of us. “Look how beautiful it is.”

  We got to Trubnaya, and Dima pulled a U-turn. “Why are you turning around?” asked my grandmother. “Where are we going?”

  The right we took must have made her think we were going to Emma Abramovna’s—that was usually where we went when we went in a car in that direction.

  “We’re going to the new apartment,” said Dima.

  “The new apartment,” said my grandmother. It was half a question, but we did not answer.

  Everything was quiet for a while, but then we passed Clean Ponds and my grandmother suspected something was up.

  “You know,” she said, turning to Dima, as if just thinking of something, “let’s go back. I think it’s time to go back.”

  “It’s OK,” said Dima. “We’re almost there.”

  My grandmother saw that we were not turning back, and she tried to take an interest in the sights. We were traveling along Clean Ponds, one of the most beautiful areas of Moscow, and it was a warm summer day, and there wasn’t much traffic, so we sped along.

  I thought I was going to cry. What were we doing? Already so much of her memory had been erased. And much of the city she knew had been erased. Now we were erasing her physical connection to the place she’d lived for fifty years.

  We crossed the bridge over the Yauza River, in the shadow of one of the huge Stalin-era stone skyscrapers, and here my grandmother tried again.

  “You know what,” she said, as if very casually. “Let’s go back. Don’t you think it’s time to go back?”

  “Grandma,” said Dima. I looked up when I heard the tone of his voice. He was crying. In the back I also started crying. Dima said, “We’re almost there.”

  And in just a few minutes we were. By the time we got out of the car our eyes were dry again.

  * * *

  • • •

  Dima and Seraphima Mikhailovna had done a good job with the apartment: the bedroom was set up to look almost exactly like her old bedroom, with her same cot, her
old desk, and all her photos of us and Uncle Lev arranged on a little shelf above it, and next to her bed the green armchair on which I’d started sitting while she read. Into the living room we had imported the green foldout couch and, heroically, the standing closet. Nonetheless my grandmother was confused. She was tired from the ride and we brought her into her new bedroom so she could lie down. She recognized her bed and her bedding. “This is my bed,” she said experimentally.

  “Yes,” we said.

  She lay down and we left her, but a few minutes later she came out and asked, very politely, like a guest, where the bathroom was. I walked her there. Then she came into the living room, where we were still unpacking the boxes, and said, “How terrible!” about the mess. “Andryushik,” she said, “tell me, where do I live?” I walked her the few steps to her bedroom, and once again she recognized it, and turned to me and asked, “This is my room, right?”

  I said yes.

  In the late afternoon, as we continued to unpack, she took a long nap in her room. When she woke up she was even more disoriented. When I came into her room to check on her, she was happy and surprised to see me. “Andryushik,” she said, “my Andryushik.” Then she asked me when we were going back to Moscow.

  “We are in Moscow,” I said.

  “Oh,” she said. She looked confused. If we were in Moscow, why weren’t we in her apartment? “Well,” she said, “just let me know what time the train is.”

  “What train, Grandma?”

  “Back to Moscow. Just tell me the time and I’ll be there.”

  “OK,” I said. The move had somehow triggered a deep confusion in my grandmother. I started heading out of the room but she called me back.

  “What time is the train?” she said.

  “Grandma,” I said again, “to where?”

  “Pereyaslavl’.” It was where she’d been born.

  I knew if I tried to say anything I would burst into tears, and that this would worry her. So I didn’t say anything.