Keith Gessen - A Terrible Country

“I just got back together with Susan,” Michael was saying. “I don’t want to go hit on Russian girls.”

“But they like you,” Roberto said.

“No, they don’t. They just do it to make the rich Russian guys jealous.”

“Michael, who cares why they do it? It is not for us to understand.”

“Why does everyone in this town just want to sleep with hot chicks?” Michael asked. He seemed almost pained by this. “It’s like, there are other things.”

Roberto shook his head sadly. “You do not understand life,” he said. “Life is for living . Look at Putin. Or Berlusconi. He is an old man. He has unlimited power over his country. And still he is chasing after the girls.”

“I don’t want to be like Berlusconi!”

“OK, OK, no Berlusconi. But Russian girls are the most beautiful in the world. Most generous. You are being unreasonable!”

“Come on, you wanker!” cried Howard. He was looking at the television as he said this. We all turned to the game. The sequence ended with the player addressed by Howard kicking the ball over the goal. Howard deflated and turned momentarily to Roberto and Michael. “I’ll go,” he said.

Apparently this did not meet with Roberto’s approval. “You ask too many questions,” he said to Howard. “Girls don’t want to feel like they are being interrogated.” Now to me: “He says: Where are you from? What do you do? How many siblings you have? Do you want to do a photo with me? They think he’s from FSB.”

“I’m curious,” said Howard.

“I’m going to Rasputin,” Roberto said menacingly. “If you cannot get in, I will still go.”

“I’ll take that chance,” said Howard.

“This is life.” Roberto sighed. “Those who can, don’t want to. Those who cannot…”

“Are full of passionate intensity!” Howard supplied. “You’ll see,” he said. “Tonight is my night.” And he hopped off the couch and headed into his bedroom to put on some nicer clothes.

Those were the guys across the landing. They paid their rent in rubles on the first of the month. Having received it, I then had to take it, with my grandmother, to Dima’s bank, which was several subway stops and one transfer away. I had to bring my grandmother because, due to some Russian law meant to prevent either capital flight or capital infusion, it was illegal for a foreign citizen (me) to deposit funds into the account of a Russian or dual citizen (Dima). So I had to drag her to the bank. When we did this the first time she was so tired from the subway ride that she practically collapsed in a chair the minute we walked into HSBC. I went up to the window and explained that I was depositing money into my brother’s account and that our grandmother would sign for it. I received a form and walked it over to Baba Seva. As she signed it, she asked what it was. Very loudly I said, “We are depositing the rent from Dima’s subletters into his account!” I said this loudly because it was plain for everyone to see that actually I had found some elderly lady on the street and asked her to help me deposit stolen money into an offshore account. When I mentioned the subletters, she said, “Who?”

“The subletters! Dima’s subletters! The soldiers!”

“Oh, the soldiers.”

I brought the form back to the window. No one said a word. I withheld two hundred rubles from the rent so we could take a car home, but by the time we got out of the bank, the traffic was so bad that we had to take the subway again anyway. I kept the two hundred rubles.

I wasn’t sure if, as the rent collector, it was appropriate for me to hang out with the soldiers; nor whether, as a thirty-three-year-old academic who had never been to a real nightclub, much less one with face control, it would be pathetic of me to want to do so; nor was I sure I even wanted to. It was a relief to speak English, to not have to worry about whom to address as ty and whom as vy , and to be welcomed back into the long luxurious adolescence of the contemporary Western male. This wasn’t of course what I had come for. It felt like a cop-out. But I didn’t have a lot of other options.

I had a brief social outing in mid-September with Dima’s friends, whom I thought I could perhaps borrow as friends while I was there as I had once hoped to borrow Dima’s car. A guy named Maxim had been, apparently, the one to blame for the exercise bike clogging up my room. That is to say, Dima, when leaving, had asked him if he wanted it, and Maxim said yes and then failed all summer to pick it up. When he eventually did stop by for the bike, he said he was having a birthday party just around the corner that weekend, and I should come.

I met him and a few others at a small French restaurant called Jean-Jacques down near the Tsvetnoi Boulevard subway station. It wasn’t terribly expensive, for Moscow, but it was definitely out of my price range. Before I could think up some excuse to leave, Maxim bought me a French beer and introduced me around; the small group of friends—Alla, Borya, Kristina, Denis, Elena, Fyodor—were all also Dima’s friends, closer to my age than to his. They seemed nice enough. Dima was a business mogul but he had always chosen his friends from the circle of art students, bohemians, and journalists. As they talked, I gathered that these Moscow friends worked in advertising and magazines and public relations. They were interested in politics—Maxim and Elena had been at the protest at Clean Ponds that my grandmother and I had run into the other day—and dispensed their opinions with that mixture of bluster, sarcasm, and despair that I’d grown used to already from Echo of Moscow. “These goblins think they’re going to weather the world financial crisis while everyone else goes under,” Maxim said. “It’s a joke.”

“Whereas I think the Americans,” said Fyodor, turning to me, “they’re going to right the ship pretty quickly, don’t you think?”

He said ty . But I had no idea. I knew that back home people were withdrawing their life savings from banks and discussing which root vegetables they should buy in case supermarkets closed down for the winter. And it was the people closest to the world of finance who seemed most frightened. To Fyodor I said, “I don’t know. My friends in America are pretty freaked out.”

“They’ll be fine,” Maxim said with authority. “America will be fine. But Russia is fucked. This country is run by idiots.”

Soon the conversation turned to culture. There was a long and intricate discussion of the first season of Breaking Bad; asked to weigh in as an expert on all things American, I had to admit I’d never seen the show, nor been to New Mexico, nor tried crystal meth. And in general I think I was a disappointment to them. When they learned that I lived in New York they started asking me about the art galleries and restaurants they knew there, which I had never been to or even heard of. Every minute I spent with them made it clearer how much more money they had than I did.

The one bit of common ground we found was in our anger at Russia. When I told them about my experience trying to play hockey at Sokolniki, they were properly indignant. “That’s typical Russian lack of culture,” said Alla, a marketing director. “Disgraceful.”

“Don’t worry,” said Borya, who worked in advertising, “there are still some normal people left in this country.”

“Do you know any hockey games?” I asked.

“No. I prefer tennis.”

“For hockey you really need blat ,” said Kristina—an in, a connection.

This made me angry all over again. “That’s ridiculous!” I said. “Hockey should be for everyone.”

“To be fair,” Maxim said, “if you let just anyone play, they’d probably ruin it.”