Keith Gessen - A Terrible Country

The hot water, I knew, was regulated by a mini-boiler that was mounted in the corner of the bathroom. It was like a stove in that it had a little blue pilot light always working; when you turned on the hot water, the pilot light lit a big blue flame that warmed the water as, I guess, it went through the boiler. I went into the bathroom and, sure enough, the pilot light was extinguished. So I had identified the cause of the problem. But that was only half the battle.

Dima had left me the number of his handyman, Stepan, to call in case anything broke. But surely I could fix this myself? I tried fiddling with the knobs on the boiler, none of which were labeled, to no effect; then I tried fiddling with them while holding a lit match next to where the pilot light used to be, to equally little effect. Then I tried to do all this with the hot water on. Then I tried it with the cold water on. Some of these attempts required the participation of my grandmother, who kept mumbling, “We’re ruined, we’re ruined,” over and over as she turned on the hot water, the cold water, and both of them at once. These attempts in their various combinations took about an hour and didn’t get us anywhere. Finally, I broke down and called Stepan.

“Did you try turning the knob at the back to the left with the hot water on?” he asked right away.

“Yes.”

“All right, I’ll come by. The traffic’s bad so it’s going to take a while, and I’ll need to charge you for that.”

“How much?”

“All told, fifteen hundred.”

That was sixty dollars at the time. It seemed like a lot. But we needed hot water. “OK,” I said.

Stepan was there two hours later, a gruff giant with a bushy mustache. He said hello to my grandmother, whom he knew by name, and headed for the bathroom. It took him exactly two seconds to get the pilot light back on. “You have to hold the knob in position for a bit,” he said. “Otherwise the gas doesn’t get there.”

I handed him the rubles, which I’d prepared, and he took them with an air of profound regret, as if this was really something that should not have happened. I tried to cheer him up.

“Next time I’ll be able to do it myself!” I said.

“You should have done it yourself this time,” Stepan said gloomily, bid farewell to my grandmother, and left.

Otherwise, around the house, things were OK. I grew used to my scratchy sheets and instant coffee (when I finally found a place that sold French presses, I discovered I could not afford one), and even the lack of wi-fi started to seem like a blessing, keeping me away from student blog posts and fruitless rage-filled Facebook sessions. The one real problem was that I couldn’t sleep. I kept waking at five in the morning and then lying in bed hoping to get to sleep again before I gave up and got out of bed. Then in the late afternoon I would become unbearably sleepy; as this was the time my grandmother most needed company, I would try to stay awake, but I didn’t always manage.

The time difference was mostly to blame, but so too, I thought, was my sudden lack of exercise. Back in New York I either played hockey or went jogging or used the university gym just about every day of the week. Now, suddenly, I did not. I tried to go jogging a few times but jogging along the street was miserable, because of the cars sitting in traffic and spewing exhaust, and jogging along the pedestrian strip on the boulevard was too annoying, since you had to either wait at a large intersection every tenth of a mile or turn back and run the same section again. As for gyms, I had looked up a few that were within walking distance and not one of them cost less than three hundred dollars a month. The solution was hockey. I had lugged all my stuff to this so-called hockey mecca, but Dima had so far failed to provide me the game he had promised, and I could learn nothing on my own online—there was no information about recreational hockey, or even the location of hockey rinks. It was like the rinks were nuclear research towns, to be kept top secret.

The worst part of the sleep situation was that it was making me irritable. I didn’t realize just how irritable until one day I heard my grandmother shuffling past my bedroom door while I was working. I tried whenever possible to work at the Coffee Grind, but it was sometimes such a production to get out of the house (Where was I going? To a café? But we had plenty of food in the house! No, I’m going to the café to work. To work? Did I have a job at the café?) that I was trying, as an experiment, to work at home. I would certainly save on cappuccinos. But it wasn’t going well. When I tried to work in the kitchen, the room in the house with the most light, my grandmother came in and sat with me and started offering me food. I went into my room and shut the door. But she pursued me there as well. She’d knock, ask some question—What time did I want to have lunch? Did I want chicken? Did I remember her husband Lev?—and then, having received an answer, would promptly forget it and return in five minutes to ask again.

On this afternoon that I’m remembering, about two weeks after I’d arrived, I was sitting in my room, making my way through a digital pile of student blog responses I’d pasted into a Word document at the Grind, when I heard my grandmother shuffling toward my door. I braced for her knock, but she shuffled past instead. About forty-five seconds later, she was by my door again, and again she failed to knock. This was impossible. I waited for her to come back, and when she did I rushed to the door and opened it. I found her there, in her robe, with her hand up in a small fist, preparing to knock at last.

“WHAT IS IT?” I shouted.

My grandmother looked at me with such pathetic fear and surprise that I immediately regretted it. “I—I don’t know,” she said. “I can’t remember. I’m so sorry.”

“It’s OK,” I said, trying to soothe her. “I’m sorry.”

But she walked away.

At that moment I concluded that I needed to solve this sleep situation before it got any worse. I needed to find some exercise. If I couldn’t jog or afford a gym, then I would need to find a hockey game.

The next day I wrote Dima to ask if he’d found out anything at all, and he apologized and said it was trickier than he’d anticipated and that the only thing he’d learned was that there was a game at Sokolniki, at the Spartak arena. He didn’t know when or who, but maybe I could just show up there and figure it out? It’s certainly what you’d do in America. So one day I finally packed all my gear into a large blue Ikea bag I found in the closet—I had, somewhat rashly and also to save on baggage fees, thrown out my ragged old hockey bag before leaving Brooklyn and simply stuffed my gear into my big red suitcase—and in the evening took the metro to Sokolniki.

I reached the rink without any trouble: it was an actual stadium, the home rink of Spartak, and unlike most buildings in Moscow it was neither surrounded by a tall metal fence nor insanely and unreasonably guarded. There was a guard at the entrance, but he saw my hockey stuff and nodded me along. I made my way down to the ice. It was a nice, modern, professional rink, with about five thousand seats; I had never played on a professional rink before; presumably Spartak was out of town or simply wasn’t using the ice that evening, and whoever ran the rink rented it out to earn some extra money. Very cool. Only in Russia, I thought. For about five minutes, the country struck me as a vast informal arrangement, outside the reach of modernity and regimentation, an ever-evolving experiment. I liked the place. Like I say, this feeling lasted about five minutes.

A pickup game was in progress. The level was mixed, with a few excellent players weaving through mostly mediocre ones. It was a little incongruous to see these middle-aged nonprofessionals on a professional ice surface and on the professional benches, in this beautiful arena, but it was definitely a game I could play in. And there weren’t too many guys—three on each bench, in fact, which is a couple too few.