Keith Gessen - A Terrible Country

On one of the benches stood a guy in street clothes, like he was a coach. He probably wasn’t a coach—I had noticed that there were always guys like this hanging around in Russia, without any apparent purpose, just because—but I figured he’d know what was up.

As I walked toward him I realized that since I’d arrived I had hardly interacted with anyone who wasn’t my grandmother, and I wasn’t sure in this situation whether to use the familiar ty or the polite vy . Back in Boston my parents had said vy to just about everyone except their close friends, but the culture had moved on, and my sense was more people now said ty . But I wasn’t sure. Vy was safer, and I went with vy . “Excuse me,” I said, using the polite form. “Can I play with you guys?”

The pseudocoach thus politely addressed looked at me in a neutral fashion and said, “You’ll have to ask Zhora,” then turned back to the game.

“Excuse me,” I was forced to say again, again very politely. “Where is Zhora?”

Zhora was on the other bench. I went over. The guy closest to me on the bench was older than I was, past forty, but in good shape and with a scar on his cheek. I asked him ( vy ) if he could point out Zhora. He could. Zhora was on the ice, a big right-handed forward who could barely keep himself on his skates. Unlike most guys who can’t skate, however, he was fed a constant diet of passes from his teammates and given plenty of room by his opponents. I intuited from this that Zhora paid for the ice.

When he came to the bench at the end of his shift I saw that he was about my age, with smooth, almost babylike skin and a tan. All his equipment was brand-new and he held somewhat awkwardly a very expensive stick.

“Zhora, hello, my name is Andrei,” I said quickly. Increasingly uncertain of my vy , I added, “I just moved to Moscow and am looking for a hockey game. Do you have room?”

Zhora looked at me. I was saying vy to everyone, like a foreigner. Instead of a proper CCM hockey bag, I had a big Ikea bag with my stuff falling out. And I was wearing my favorite short-sleeve, collared shirt, from some thrift store in Massachusetts, that had a picture of a gas station and the name “Hugo” on the chest. I either looked like a very committed hockey player or a total idiot.

Zhora decided it was the latter.

“We’re full up,” he said.

This was patently untrue.

“Every single time?” I said. “Maybe you’re full today, but not next time?”

“Where’d you play?” said Zhora. He used the familiar ty , like he was my boss. I could now continue saying vy to him, in a sign of deference, or I could also switch to ty , which could be seen as aggressive. Or I could avoid expressions that required a choice.

“Where did I play?” I asked, not quite understanding.

“Yeah,” said Zhora. “For example, that guy played at Spartak.” He pointed to the rough-looking guy who’d helped me locate Zhora; he had jumped over the boards when Zhora came back to the bench and was now skating with the puck. Spartak was effortlessly dodging guys half his age; he was a tremendous hockey player.

And, to be fair, the question of where one played was not unreasonable. In hockey you don’t want to play with people who suck. They disrupt the flow of the game, for one thing, and for another, skating on a slippery surface and holding on to sticks, they can be dangerous. Zhora himself, for example, was such a player. So I didn’t exactly resent his question; it’s just that there was no way for me to answer it sensibly.

“In Boston,” I said.

Zhora chuckled. “Where in Boston?”

“In school,” I said. In Russian there is no word for high school—all school, from first grade to tenth, is referred to as “school”; more important, as I did not quite understand at the time, there is no such thing as high school sports in Russia. Youth sports take place in so-called “sports schools.” They can be affiliated with one of the major professional teams (Red Army or Dynamo or Spartak), or they can be independent. They train kids from a young age, sometimes for free, encouraging those with talent and discouraging those without it. Whereas my answer to Zhora made it sound like I’d played shinny on the pond behind my elementary school.

“School, huh?” Zhora laughed again. “No, it’s all right, we’re full up.” Then, in English: “ Sorry .”

“All right,” I said, though I was pissed. At least I hadn’t had to call him vy again. As I walked away, I watched the game a little longer. There really were three or four terrific players out there, but the rest of the guys were at my level or worse. They had not played at Spartak.

My stuff felt heavy as I lugged it back to the metro, and to add further humiliation to the previous humiliation, I got stopped by two cops and asked for my “documents.” This had happened to me all the time when I was younger—the police usually stop non-Slavic-looking men, in case they’re illegal migrants or Chechen terrorists—but it hadn’t happened to me since I’d been in town, presumably because I had aged out of the illegal immigrant/Chechen terrorist cohort. But my bag must have looked suspicious. I showed them my passport, they started practicing their English but I answered them in Russian, and then they lost interest and rudely ( ty ) sent me on my way.

What the fuck was wrong with these people? In America, at least in 2008, you didn’t have to show your documents all the time. And you could play hockey! You showed up at a rink, found out the schedule, put down ten dollars—maybe twenty if you were in New York—and played hockey. That was all. “Open hockey,” it was called, or “stick time.” Beautiful words! As long as you had a full face mask, you could play. And here? I had come to Moscow to take care of my grandmother and I couldn’t even get into a hockey game. When I went to the store to buy groceries, the cashiers were rude. The people on the subway were pushy. The baristas at the Coffee Grind were always smiling, but that was clearly because someone had instructed them in Western-style customer service, and they would lose their jobs if they cut it out.

A few days after my failed attempt at Spartak, my grandmother and I were at her pharmacy, waiting to refill some prescriptions. Most Russian pharmacies don’t make a distinction between over-the-counter and prescription medicines and just keep everything behind the counter. This leads to lines. We were waiting in the line, then, when two huge guys in black jeans and black sweaters walked in, took a look at the line, and cut it, elbowing aside the woman who was waiting at the window. These guys were thugs, just like the old 1990s thugs, though with a difference. They were less fat and dressed a little better; I had begun noticing guys like this around the neighborhood, mostly sitting in black SUVs and coming in and out of the Grind, and I had concluded, rightly or wrongly, that they were from the FSB. So that was what had become of the post-Soviet criminal class—they weren’t all dead or in fancy suits; they were working for the state! I looked at the line: it was five women, aged forty to sixty, plus my grandmother and me.

“Excuse me,” I called out. “What’s going on?” The men ignored me. One of them was giving directions to the pharmacist, who was taking notes, and pointing to something in the back.

I said it louder. One of the men turned around and walked toward me.

He said, “What’s the problem?”

“We have a line here.”

“Yeah?” said the giant. He was ugly, very ugly, with enormous jowls and a shaved head and small beady eyes.