Keith Gessen - A Terrible Country

My grandmother didn’t pick up on the threat and seemed to think this was a new friend of mine. Very politely, she said, “Hello!”

The giant gave her a look. “Hello,” he said neutrally.

Then he looked back at me. “It’s a good line,” he said. “You should stay in it.” The ugly giant used the ty on me, and then turned around and went back to his buddy. They got whatever it was they came for and left. On the way out the giant gave me a long look, to make sure I understood him, and after a moment I looked away.

“Andryush, who was that man?” asked my grandmother, as if she’d been waiting for an introduction.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Oh.” She sounded confused.

It was humiliating. Minor, but humiliating. We walked home with her medicines.

“That man was very fat,” said my grandmother finally. “I don’t like fat men. I was married two times, and there were many men in between. None of them was fat.”

“Grandma!” I said.

“What?”

“It’s not nice to be mean to fat people.”

“What can I do? I don’t like fat people.”

I looked at my grandmother, who held on to my arm as we walked, just to steady herself a little. I wasn’t able to get her to open up about Stalinism, but I knew from my mother that she had despised the Soviet regime. It had poisoned her life, thwarted her career, and caused her daughter to emigrate to a foreign land, where, far from her loving mother, she became sick and died. When the regime collapsed, my grandmother cheered. And now? The neighborhood in which she’d lived on and off for sixty years had changed. It had become terrifyingly expensive. My brother was subletting his apartment next door for several thousand dollars a month. There were expensive coffee shops, expensive supermarkets, expensive clothing boutiques all around us. Most of the residents were new residents; the old residents had been bought off or died off or were pushed off to make room. All around us buildings were being refurbished, renewed, knocked down, and sometimes all three—several buildings on Pechatnikov were in the process of being totally rebuilt, with the exception of their nineteenth-century brick facades. You’d be walking along this quiet side street and see a facade still standing and some kind of work happening behind it. Then you looked, and it was an entire construction site back there, even the foundation was being replaced, but they’d kept the facade for some reason. And then among all these gleaming new objects and massive open-hole construction sites walked my grandmother, in her pink shirt and green pants, like a ghost haunting her own life. She was looking for some inexpensive cheese.

She must have sensed something in my mood because now she said, “Did I ever tell you how we lost our dacha?”

I was surprised. No, she hadn’t. I knew it was the result of some kind of financial machinations in the early nineties, but not anything besides that.

“It was Lyova’s friends,” she said. “And, you know, RussOil. When Lyova was still a student he came up with a theory that there were oil deposits on Yamal.” This was the Yamal Peninsula, in the Arctic. “But there was never any time to explore that. Then, when the institute”—his research institute, in Dubna—“started falling apart, some of his friends asked him to start a business to see if they could find the oil.”

Uncle Lev was a geophysicist tasked by the mighty empire with helping it find its oil. Alongside the great Jewish-Italian physicist Bruno Pontecorvo, who defected to the USSR in 1950, Uncle Lev had pioneered the use of neutron physics in well logging. This discovery radically increased the efficiency of Soviet oil exploration, helping the workers’ state become the largest oil producer in the world. It was oil that bankrolled the Soviet military buildup of the 1970s and the invasion of Afghanistan, and it was the collapse of oil prices in 1986 that caused the Soviet Union to start unraveling. Through it all, Uncle Lev worked on figuring out the physical structure of matter, the better to discover whether it had oil in it.

As my grandmother now told the story, and as Dima later pieced it together for me where she had gaps in her memory, Uncle Lev and his friends started their company with a small investment from the institute in the hopes of finding oil on Yamal. They made a plan, hired equipment, and started exploring, using the best and latest methods. But of course there were delays and cost overruns. As the exploration of the site started eating through the new company’s small capital account, all the founders, Uncle Lev very much included, started raising money so they could finish the exploration. My grandmother and Uncle Lev had already lost all their savings in the various currency “reforms” that had been undertaken by the government, but they still had all their old stuff, plus an apartment in Moscow, a dacha in Sheremetevo, and an apartment in Dubna. First they sold their old clothes, books, and skis. When this was not enough, my grandmother and Uncle Lev took a loan out with their dacha as collateral. When even this was not enough, my grandmother came to Moscow intent on mortgaging the apartment. This was only prevented by Dima, who was living in the apartment at the time, with his first wife. He succeeded in convincing my grandmother that it was a bad idea. This was good, because what happened next was that the group ran out of money and was forced to seek funding from its partners, one of which was a subsidiary of RussOil. Apparently this subsidiary resented the additional request because a month after the funding came through, oil was struck, in very impressive quantities for a field of that size and in that place, and on the very next day the geologists came to their office to find the locks changed and guards with RussOil insignia on their uniforms posted at the doors. They weren’t even allowed in to retrieve their stuff. There were court battles and attempts to reach out to the press, and at the end of it, one of the geologists had been beaten up in front of his apartment building, one was run over by a car—perhaps accidentally—and Uncle Lev had had a mini-stroke, after which he could no longer use his left arm. And of course he and my grandmother lost the dacha.

“He was very philosophical about it,” my grandmother said now, as we reached our building. “He kept saying, ‘That’s capitalism. We didn’t know the rules, and we lost. It’s our own fault.’ But I always thought his friends betrayed him.

“So that’s the story,” she concluded. “Should we have some lunch?”

Lunch! Lunch. Of course we should have some lunch. But Jesus, I thought. What a fucking shithole. What a fucked-up, good-for-nothing, awful country. Just like my grandmother always said.

“Grandma,” I said, “let’s move to America. You and me. We’ll live in New York. There are lots of nice parks there.”

“I don’t like New York,” said my grandmother matter-of-factly. “I prefer Boston.”

My grandmother had never been to New York. But she had been to Boston for my mother’s funeral.

“All right,” I said. “We can live in Boston.”

“Andryush,” my grandmother said, “I’m not going anywhere. I’d be dead before we got off the plane. I’m staying right here. Next summer I’m going to Musya’s dacha, and then I can die.”

In this shithole? I thought, but didn’t say. In this particular shithole of a country? Dying is all it’s good for. Why give them the satisfaction?

But I did not bring up America again.

As for my sleeping problem, I started drinking a big Russian beer before going to bed. I bought it at the smelly little grocery at the corner of Lubyanka and the boulevard, or at another smelly little grocery on Pechatnikov, closer to our house, accessible through a little gap between the building next to ours and the church wall. This little alleyway off Pechatnikov was also where our dumpster was, and sometimes at night there was a guy eating food out of it. Was he the same guy who used to eat from that dumpster years before? If so, it spoke well of his longevity. Anyway, the beer put me to sleep faster, and kept me asleep longer, though in the morning I’d always have a bad feeling of some kind. The water used in Russian beers was not known for its purity. But imported beer cost twice as much and a minor tummyache was, in the final analysis, a small price to pay for some sleep.