Keith Gessen - A Terrible Country

So these were the Russian liberals who opposed the Putin regime. It turned out they hated Russia. They sort of lived there, but they also sort of lived somewhere else. None of them watched Russian TV. I tried, as part of the general pop culture conversation, to mention my affection for the Russian reality programs, only to be told by Elena that the one I liked best—a hyperviolent version of Cheaters, about cheating husbands and (mostly) wives—was fake.

“What do you mean fake?”

“It’s fake. All the so-called reality shows are fake.”

“How do you know?”

“I’m a journalist,” she said. “I know these things.” Elena was blond, my height, stocky, with a haircut that framed her face and pretty blue eyes. She was a kind of Slavic version of Sarah, actually, and I found myself gravitating toward her. I must have looked stricken at the information about my show, because she added, “Sorry.”

But of course it made sense. The structure of the plot was always the same, and the idea that they actually captured as much illicit footage as they claimed was risible. It was obvious to me now.

“It’s still an interesting cultural product?” I said.

“It’s trash. Everything on Russian TV is trash.”

“I’ll tell you what I watch,” Maxim interrupted. He was a former magazine editor who now managed an upscale wine store. “My weekly schedule is Mad Men on Monday, House on Tuesday, Breaking Bad on Wednesday…” These were all a day later than the shows aired in the States. That’s how long it took before they appeared on one of the online TV sites.

“And what about Russian TV?” I asked.

“Never in a million years,” said Maxim. “I couldn’t watch it if I tried, to be honest. I don’t have an antenna. My TV is a screen for my computer, nothing more.”

I wanted to leave. I wasn’t sure I liked these people; I didn’t know whether to say ty or vy to them; and, more to the point, if I stayed I’d have to buy Maxim an expensive French beer. On the other hand, Elena. She had insulted my favorite show, but I liked the way she’d done it. I checked her right hand for a wedding band (Russians wear their wedding rings on their right hands), and there was none; just in case (who knew with these people), I checked her left hand also. There too she was unmarried. We were all standing, though not at the bar, and I decided to get Maxim a beer, and one for myself so I could relax a little, and I also asked Elena if she wanted anything. “Why not?” she said, which seemed like a good sign, and asked for a glass of grenache. It cost twenty dollars, which with two nine-dollar beers put me out thirty-eight dollars, plus tip. I had to ask the bartender to repeat himself, because it sounded like a mistake. It wasn’t a mistake.

Nonetheless, when Elena finished her drink and announced it was time to go, I asked if I could walk her ( vy, I said) wherever she was going.

“If you want,” she said, using ty . This meant that I should also switch to ty . Or not?

Elena was parked on Pechatnikov, on the way to my grandmother’s place, and as we walked—it was a nice night, in the brief autumnal interim between summer and the bitter cold—I asked her where she worked as a journalist. “Echo of Moscow,” she said.

“I listen to that all the time!” I said. “It’s my grandmother’s favorite station.”

“I’m glad to hear that,” said Elena. “For me it’s just where I work.”

“OK,” I said. Now I said lamely, “I will listen for your show, then.” ( Vy again! I couldn’t help it.)

“OK,” she said.

Elena was clearly not into me. On the other hand, Russians are very reserved. Maybe this taciturnity bordering on outright hostility was actually her way of being into me?

“That was a fun party,” I said.

“It was OK.”

“Where do you live?”

“Zamoskvorechie,” she said. “Do you know it?”

I didn’t. And we had arrived at her car.

“Well, good night,” said Elena, and started to open her car door.

“Wait,” I said. I could tell she didn’t like me, but somehow her physical resemblance to Sarah convinced me that just maybe she did.

Elena turned toward me reluctantly, and as she did so, I leaned in to kiss her. She deftly turned her head so that I gave her cheek a kiss instead.

“Andrei,” she said, pushing me away with her hand, not unkindly, “you seem like a nice young man. But I don’t think you’re cut out for this.”

“For what?” I said. Did she mean kissing?

“For this,” she said, gesturing up the street and around it. From where we stood on Pechatnikov, you could see some of the church steeples and oil and gas headquarters of downtown. “For Russia.”

“Oh,” I said. But I didn’t understand. “In what sense?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Just a feeling I have.”

And with that, Elena got into her car. Her driver’s seat was on the right-hand side—this usually meant the car had been bought used by an enterprising young man in Japan, taken by ferry to Vladivostok, and then driven straight across Russia to be sold in Moscow—and she spent a few moments studying the rearview mirror and trying to figure out if there were cars coming up Pechatnikov.

Then she thought of something and rolled down her window.

“You don’t have to say vy to everyone,” she said. “It makes you sound retarded.”

“OK,” I said. I tried to think of a sentence in which I would address her with the familiar ty , but I couldn’t. “OK,” I said again, stupidly. “It’s a deal.”

Elena nodded and drove off.

What did she mean, I wasn’t cut out for Russia? It felt insulting, though I couldn’t quite locate the insult. Was I too much of a wimp? I hadn’t been in a fight since college (it was more like wrestling, and a draw), and though I was in pretty good physical condition for an academic, it’s true there was an air of violence on the streets here that I didn’t know how to handle. Or did she mean something else? Was I too boring for Russia? Like in a spiritual sense? Was I too callow?

As I tried to figure it out, I noticed that the evening had another effect as well. My attempt to kiss Elena, though a failure, had reminded me of the existence of women. I hadn’t realized until then how bummed I still was about Sarah; if her breaking up with me was mostly just embarrassing, the creeping realization since I’d gotten to Moscow that she was sleeping with someone else had made me sexually depressed. I wasn’t even interested anymore. And living with one’s grandmother, I had to admit, was something of an anti-erotic experience.

But now, as I walked the streets around our house on various errands, or sat at the Coffee Grind, or occasionally turned on the TV, I realized: I wanted to fuck every woman I saw. I couldn’t tell if it was me or it was them: me because I was sexually deprived, or them because they dressed so well, took such good care of themselves. Either way, once I started thinking about it, I couldn’t stop. In the Coffee Grind, frequented not just by FSB goons but by young office workers from the adjoining neighborhood, I watched the women’s thin blouses ride up their bare backs as they leaned forward to sip their espressos. I watched them cross their legs. On the street, where they walked in high heels, I watched their ankles, their hips. Why should flesh in one place or another matter so much? It was just skin and muscle and fat. But still.

Was it me or was it them? I could swear it was them. Russian men had been drinking and yelling and shooting at one another for so long that there weren’t that many left. There were not enough men to go around . This produced intense competition for the ones who remained. Women worked out; they dressed up; they spent hours at beauty salons getting their skin smoothed, their brows plucked, their butts massaged. What I was seeing as I looked around me with a boner stirring in my pants was a calculated response to a tragic situation of scarcity. I was wrong to enjoy it. I kept telling myself that.