A Terrible Country

by Keith Gessen

  “Just tell me what time the train is,” she said again.

  “In the morning.”

  “What time in the morning?” She was very businesslike now. “How are we going to arrange it? Will I call you?” She pointed to me. “Or will you call me?” She pointed to herself.

  I waited a second before answering.

  “Let’s do this,” I said. “I’ll come over in the morning, and we’ll have tea.” This was a lie—my flight out was early the next morning—but I couldn’t think of what else to say. I said, “OK?”

  “Tea?” said my grandmother. “Yes, that sounds good. I’ll see you in the morning.” And she closed her eyes.

  It was almost nine by the time we finished unpacking. The books were all out of the boxes and on the shelves, all the framed photographs and the few works of art my grandmother had collected over the years were on the walls, the plates and silverware were in their cupboards, and Seraphima Mikhailovna set up the green foldout couch and was ready to sleep on it. Dima and I were going to sleep on our bunk beds back at the old apartment.

  I peeked into my grandmother’s room one last time. There was still a bare penumbra of light coming through the window, and she was sleeping on her back, as she always did, with her hands folded gently across her stomach.

  We left.

  * * *

  • • •

  We drove home and showered. Dima pounded angrily at his computer for a while as I packed up my big red suitcase, and then asked if I wanted to go to Gentlemen of Fortune. I didn’t. “Well, I’m going to go, if you don’t mind,” he said. I didn’t mind.

  I finished packing and it was still only ten o’clock. It was my last night in Moscow. I had already said good-bye to the hockey guys, and I hadn’t tried calling Yulia in over a week. I had tried to visit Sergei and Misha in Lefortovo, but was turned away. The October email list was totally silent. The only one who still talked to me was Nikolai, from his friend’s place in Tallinn. He told me over an encrypted chat program—Gchat’s off the record was bullshit, he said; Dima had been right about that one—that he really liked Tallinn, there was a thriving tech sector, and he thought he might stay awhile.

  “What about your dacha?” I said.

  “I’ll return there in triumph after the Revolution,” Nikolai said. “We’ll throw an enormous party.”

  “)))),” I said.

  On that final night in Moscow, I texted Yulia one last time. “I’m leaving tomorrow,” I said.

  She texted back this time. She said, “Have a good trip.”

  I considered asking to see her, but I was pretty sure she’d say no. Instead I said, “Thank you,” and went to bed.

  My flight was at eight in the morning, which meant I had to be out of the house at five thirty. I decided to take a cab. It would mean an extra half hour of sleep, and I could afford it now: I was about to start getting a regular grown-up salary for the first time in my life.

  Dima wasn’t yet home when I got a call from the driver that he was downstairs. I took one last look around the Stalin apartment and then left my keys under the doormat in the stairwell. If someone broke in and stole Dima’s computer, that was his fault for staying out so late. And anyway no one broke in.

  The cab took a right on the boulevard and then kept going once we reached Trubnaya. It was so early in the morning, and a weekend, that the streets for once were almost empty. The driver took a right at the Pushkin monument, onto Tverskaya, and past Emma Abramovna’s, and Yulia’s, and Misha’s old place, from which he had been taken just the other day. We drove in silence. I remembered the feeling I’d had, exactly a year before, on the way into town on the train, that feeling of fear and excitement and worry that I’d be spotted as a foreigner. I probably no longer looked or sounded like a foreigner, and even if I did, I no longer cared. I sat in the front passenger seat and watched the city of my birth race by, decrepit building by decrepit building, and here and there some poor carless bastard walking along, scrambling through the broken glass and heaps of piled-up shit.

  EPILOGUE

  I HAD THOUGHT my research budget would mean I’d be flying back and forth almost all the time, but I soon got sucked up by the semester—the teaching and committee meetings and office hours. I enjoyed it all, I wore corduroys and a sweater to class and discussed the Gulag, but it didn’t leave much time for other things. I managed to make a short visit over Thanksgiving. My grandmother did not remember me.

  “It’s Andryusha,” Seraphima Mikhailovna said to her. “You’re always asking after him.”

  “No,” my grandmother said, shaking her head. “I don’t remember.”

  Nonetheless we sat for a while, drank tea, and played a few games of anagrams. My grandmother was still unstoppable. There was no place for me to stay in the apartment. I stayed instead in a pretty filthy hotel a few stops north of Olympic Stadium, and though I had left Anton’s stick at my grandmother’s place, I had not brought my skates. Anyway I hadn’t had any time to play back in New York, and I didn’t want to get embarrassed.

  Sergei and Misha’s trial took place in early December, during the last crunch of the semester, and I couldn’t get away; I thought it would last awhile, into break, but the prosecutors made short work of it and they both received three years in labor colonies for extremism. After that happened I did my best to bring attention to their cause, and even wrote a New York Times op-ed. President Nelson sent me a note to say how much he loved it, as did the woman who ran alumni development, but it didn’t seem to do much for Sergei and Misha. I continued trying, but I couldn’t get out of a peculiar loop, wherein I received praise, and speaking invitations, for bravely championing their cause, and they remained in prison. I did hear one time from Yulia, who had been to see Sergei—he had asked her to tell me that neither he nor Misha blamed me for what happened. “We knew what we were getting into,” Sergei said.

  * * *

  • • •

  Misha was released after his three years were up. He had had a bad time in the colony—he started drinking the moonshine some of the prisoners made from potato peels and it eventually made him sick. After getting out he moved to Germany, where he was living off fellowships. I saw him at the last meeting of the Association for Slavic, Eastern European, and Eurasian Studies in D.C. He did not look well. His prison experiences had not done as much for his career as they had for mine.

  I saw Fishman at that conference too. Things had not worked out for him at Watson—there was some kind of scandal with one of the faculty wives—and he had taken a job as a Russia expert with one of the D.C. think tanks. Occasionally he wrote columns in the Post about how the U.S. should finally “get tough” with Russia. Every time I saw Fishman the hawk in print, I wondered what our old classmate Jake, who’d once thrown Fishman halfway across a room, thought of that.

  As of this writing, Sergei is still in a labor camp. He got in trouble with the colony administration for organizing the prisoners to protest against unfair working conditions, and when he had his release hearing, he was unapologetic. “I will go back to that prison colony, or whatever colony you want to send me to,” he said. “But someday I will go back to the colony out of curiosity, to see what people have built on its ruins. And the ruins of this court, and this rotten system, also.”

  The hearing was public, and I watched it on YouTube. Sergei got another five years added to his sentence.

  Boris had remained in Kiev after the arrests. When the protests at Maidan broke out in 2013, he criticized them for a neoliberal tendency, and eventually, to the shock and dismay of at least some of his old friends, moved to Donetsk and started writing in praise of the Russian-backed Donetsk People’s Republic. I worried for his safety—according to his Facebook page he had briefly been arrested during one of the governing crises in Donetsk—even as I was still kind of mad at him: after Misha and Sergei’s trial, he had taken it upon himself
to kick me out of October.

  Not that it mattered. After the arrests they had to shut down the website, and soon people started arguing with one another. When the anti-Putin protests that they’d been predicting for years finally arrived, Sergei and Misha were still away and October for all intents and purposes had ceased to exist. What was worse, the protests were fundamentally liberal rather than socialist in character, appealing to free speech and voting rights rather than to economic justice. They were not the protests October had hoped for, and they were, eventually, crushed.

  Oleg mostly recovered from his injuries and then moved to Spain. Anton and Katya dated for a while and then broke up, and he also moved to Spain, to be closer to his ex-wife and son.

  And Yulia—after writing to me that Sergei didn’t blame me for what happened, she had not written again. But I heard from Nikolai that she kept visiting Sergei, even after he was transferred to a camp in the Far East, and that in fact they had gotten married. In a way, I’m happy for her. She finally has someone who will not let her down. And I’m happy for Sergei too, if that is the word. He is doing what he always wanted. I just hope it doesn’t kill him.

  * * *

  • • •

  My grandmother lived less than a year in her new apartment. She had been declining already; the move accelerated it. The last time I saw her, over my spring break, two months before she died, she could no longer have a conversation. She formed sentences but they were unrelated to anything that was happening. Emma Abramovna died six months before she did, and this closed her last connection to the world she had known.

  On the day she died I was able to reach Seraphima Mikhailovna over Google Talk. She didn’t have video but she had sound and she brought her laptop into my grandmother’s room.

  “Grandma!” I said.

  She was moaning in pain. She had been for an entire day, according to Seraphima Mikhailovna.

  “Grandma!” I yelled into Google Talk. I was in my office at the university. “It’s Andrei. Do you remember me? It’s Andryusha.”

  She moaned back. I don’t think she understood me. She appeared to be in terrible pain.

  “Grandma,” I said meaninglessly into the computer and wept. On the other end I heard Seraphima Mikhailovna weeping also.

  My grandmother died later that day. In her final moments, Seraphima Mikhailovna told me, she kept calling for Dima.

  We went to Moscow again and buried our grandmother.

  I have not been back since.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I am deeply grateful to a small group of people who read parts of this book over and over and over again and were always encouraging and kind: Rebecca Curtis, Mary Hart Johnson, Eric Rosenblum, and Adelaide Docx. Chad Harbach read an early draft and wisely urged me to make it shorter. My father, Alexander Gessen, and his wife, Tatiana Veselova-Gessen, and my younger brothers, Daniel and Philip Gessen, allowed me to stay with them for weeks while I rewrote this book time and again. One could not imagine a more hospitable writing retreat, and my father caught a mistranslation of telka. My sister, Masha Gessen, made some timely corrections and was, as always, wise and generous with her counsel; her wonderful book, Ester and Ruzya, was a great help and in many ways an inspiration for this one. The final edits for this book were completed at the home of my very kind aunt, Svetlana Solodovnik, in Moscow.

  I am immensely grateful to the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library for the opportunity to spend a year reading books about hockey, oil, and Russian history. The support I received there from the amazing Jean Strouse, Paul Delaverdac, Lauren Goldberger, Marie d’Origny, and Julia Parmagenta was invaluable. I am grateful to Carlos Dada, Ayana Mathis, and Michael Vasquez for staying late, to Megan Marshall for her conversations about life and literature, to Hal Foster for his humor, to Steven Pincus for explaining neoliberalism to me.

  During two crucial moments in the writing of this book, Brian Morton gave me a source of income. I owe much to him practically, but even more to his example. I am honored to consider two of the greatest magazine editors of our time, Henry Finder and Cullen Murphy, my friends as well as my editors. The incredible group that has coalesced around n+1, led by Mark Krotov, Rachel Ossip, Cosme Del Rosario-Bell, Nikil Saval, and Dayna Tortorici, continues to inspire me with its brilliance and commitment. Carla Blumenkranz is a genius. Mark Greif is present in everything I write. Ben Kunkel and Marco Roth are my ideal readers. Nell Zink sent me a note while I was writing this book that actually allowed me to finish it. Elif Batuman assured me that this was a novel. Eddie Joyce, himself a novelist, promised me that at least one person would read it. Christian Lorentzen’s commitment to literature, and to his friends, is unmatched by anyone I know.

  In Moscow I could not have survived without my friends Igor Alexandrov, Scott Burns, Anatoly Karavaev, Lenka Kabrhelova, Leonid Kuragin, Kirill Medvedev, Grant Slater, Courtney Weaver, and Marina Zarubin.

  I’m grateful to my bosses and colleagues at the J-School for letting me start a semester late so I could finish this. I’m grateful to my old teachers from Syracuse, Mary Karr and George Saunders, for three incredibly valuable years, and much support and encouragement.

  The brilliant Allison Lorentzen is the editor of this book. Everything good about it is her idea, but the bad parts were written by me. I am grateful to Diego Núñez for altering his diet so that he could more authentically shepherd this text to publication. At the Wylie Agency, Sarah Chalfant and Rebecca Nagel have been incredible supporters and counselors.

  I am grateful to my mother- and father-in-law, Kate Deshler Gould and Rob Gould, for helping so much with Raffi when he was little and I was trying to finish a first draft. Ruth Curry’s bracing monologues on tenant law and literature, as well as her unfailing generosity, were a comfort and an inspiration.

  Without Emily Gould, who took a job she didn’t much like so that I could keep writing, nothing would be possible and nothing would matter. Without little Raphael Konstaninovich Gessen-Gould, all we would do is sleep.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Keith Gessen is the author of All the Sad Young Literary Men and a founding editor of n+1. He is the editor of three nonfiction books and the translator or co-translator, from Russian, of a collection of short stories, a book of poems, and a work of oral history, Nobel Prize-winner Svetlana Alexievich's Voices from Chernobyl. A contributor to The New Yorker and The London Review of Books, Gessen teaches journalism at Columbia and lives in New York with his wife and son.

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