Keith Gessen - A Terrible Country

Andrew,

I’m sorry you feel that way. I’m sure you have far more important things to do than take around one of my colleagues.

All right, Alex, I thought. We’ll see.

But what would we see? I didn’t know. If there was some way to shame and humiliate Alex Fishman, I had yet to find it. He seemed in certain ways beyond shame and beyond humiliation. He had once written an exuberant five-thousand-word blog post about the wonderful academic achievements of the chair of the Princeton Slavic department— at the same time as he was applying for a job there . How do you shame a person like that?

So had I made a mistake? Not just in coming to Russia, though that too. Had I totally mislived my life? My parents had taken a great risk and undergone a great trial to bring me to a country where I could do, basically, anything I wanted. And what had I done? My friends from college and high school were now doctors, lawyers, bankers. Some of them were in Hollywood; their visions were being beamed daily to millions of people, and on top of that they were rich. They lived in nice houses in Los Angeles and gave birth to multiple children. Whereas I had chosen to read books. What a joke! I liked reading books, and I had thought that reading them would help me understand the world. But I did not understand the world. I knew nothing of the world. And to be a grown man—as I was now, no denying it—and still to be reading books? It was pathetic. And within this pathetic world, Sasha Fishman at least had a job. He didn’t have to teach four online classes just to keep the lights on. No one would ever think to hire him at minimum wage to drive them around Moscow.

The worst part of the whole Richard Sutherland business was, I could have used the money. I would have had to neglect my grandmother but, after a few days of fetching Sutherland some seltzers, I could have called Sonya back and paid her cleaning fee. After the exchange with Fishman, though, I couldn’t go back. I wrote to Sutherland and politely begged off.

My grandmother was disappointed in me. She had an insatiable appetite for company, but all her friends, as she repeatedly said, were dead or gone, and there were only so many times in a day she could call Emma Abramovna and drop hints about her dacha. Then there was me. I could be talked to. But I had my own issues. Once my class had made it through The Cossacks, we moved on to Fathers and Sons and then straight into War and Peace . The students became infected by Tolstoy’s amateur historicizing. They started coming up with all sorts of theories. Some had studied Hegel in college, and quite recently; others hadn’t been in an educational setting for forty years. One of my older students had a historical theory about Muslims that may or may not have been in violation of the university policy on hate speech; I had to delete his comments and then talk to him about them, after which I re-posted them with a short introduction saying why I was doing so. And this was just one section. I hadn’t made any rules about when the students could or couldn’t post, so they posted whenever they felt like it and I had to read it all to make sure it wasn’t too unhinged or too racist or blatantly false. In short, this was taking up more and more of my time, and meanwhile I wasn’t getting any closer to finding myself a job for next year. And because of this, I had less patience for my discussions with my half-deaf grandmother than, in retrospect, I wish I’d had.

The saving grace was that I thought she wouldn’t notice. She heard so little and forgot so much. We’d go to the park or to Emma Abramovna’s and the next day she’d give no indication that she remembered. She couldn’t remember what we were discussing five minutes ago. Why would she remember if I ran off to the Grind after lunch without sticking around to chat?

Occasionally Howard from next door would come by to eat sushki and talk about his reporting—once he learned I had a PhD in Russian literature, he started asking me for literary references with which to sprinkle his Moscow Times articles. But pretty quickly the conversations would devolve into tales of Howard’s sex adventures. The first time I saw him after his trip to Rasputin, he told me he had been roofied by someone at the club and bundled into a cab by Roberto (who thought he was just very drunk); next thing he knew he was waking up on the ground on the outskirts of the city without his wallet. His cabdriver had robbed him. He tried calling his roommates, but was still so messed up that he was unable to make them understand what he was saying. “I thought I was going to die out there,” he said. Finally he managed to hail a car and somehow explain where we lived, but the driver did not trust him to go upstairs and get money, and Howard ended up paying for the ride by giving the driver his phone. “That was very resourceful of you,” I said.

“Thanks,” said Howard. “But it was a three-hundred-dollar phone.” Nonetheless, he was uncowed. He had gone to Rasputin again, in fact; he had also started using a website that allowed you to order prostitutes after viewing their profiles and reading customer reviews of their performance.

“Are you serious?” I cried. I was shocked and amazed.

“Yeah,” said Howard. “Want to see?”

“No!” I said. “Or, I don’t know. Maybe later.”

When he left I saw that my grandmother was standing in the doorway to her room, watching us. For a second I feared she had overheard Howard’s description of the hooker website. But we had been speaking in English, and anyway my grandmother could hardly have heard us from over there. She was upset, it turned out, about something else.

“You never talk to me like that,” she said.

“Like what?”

“With so much animation. So much interest.”

“Sure I do,” I said.

“No,” she said. “You don’t.”

I was at a loss. I mean, this was a very interesting website Howard was describing. But of course my grandmother was right. And instead of apologizing I denied it. “We talk all the time!” I said. “We’re always talking! Even right now we’re talking! We can talk some more. What do you want to talk about?”

My grandmother pursed her lips. She knew I was being unfair but she was willing to give me a chance. “OK,” she said. “Tell me about the situation. What’s the situation in the country?”

For some reason this question set me off. “How should I know?” I said. “I sit here all day trying to answer your questions. I have no idea what the situation is!”

I was looming over her as I said this.

“You don’t need to yell,” said my little grandmother as she stepped back into her room and with trembling hands closed the door behind her. I felt awful.

Later I apologized, and she forgave me, but this sort of thing kept happening in different variations: her criticizing my shitty caretaking, me becoming defensive and unhappy and an even shittier caretaker than I had been.

What was the situation in the country? It was true I didn’t know. But it wasn’t true that I had no idea.

Everyone in Moscow seemed to drive a black Audi and there were websites where you could order a prostitute after reading all her customer reviews. Outside of a few stinky Soviet-era groceries, food was expensive, rent was outrageous, and hockey games were closed to outsiders. Every time I walked into the Coffee Grind and bought the cheapest item on the menu, I was amazed at all the other customers. Where did they come from, in this traumatized and wounded country? Some of them were walking over from the KGB building across the street, but not all of them, and anyway this was the cheapest café in my grandmother’s neighborhood. These people were buying a couple of double espressos and pastries and sandwiches and being charged thirty dollars. The worst part was, they didn’t even argue! You’d have thought some of them at least would have said, “What?” None of them said it. They handed over the money. They didn’t even blink.