Keith Gessen - A Terrible Country

I wrote to the rock drummer who was subletting my room that I would probably be taking it back in a month or two, and that he should start thinking about his next move.

THEN I WAITED: I waited for the swelling in my face to go down and for the days to pass until Dima came back and I was released. I was too embarrassed to show up at the Coffee Grind looking like I did, so I did my classwork at the post office on Clean Ponds; it turned out they had a bunch of old computers upstairs in a stuffy windowless room and you could pay by the minute for online access. I didn’t spend a minute longer in there than was absolutely necessary, and as a result I was around the apartment more often. My grandmother kept remarking how nice it was to have me there. Sometimes I was pleased that she was pleased with me; other times I felt resentful that it required a violent and unintentional grounding for this to happen.

In late September, the tsunami of the financial crisis finally reached our little island of stability. There wasn’t a lot of warning. It was all “island of stability, island of stability,” and then one day the ruble plunged 10 percent against the dollar and the euro. Within a week, just about every item in the groceries in our neighborhood went up 10 percent in price.

Soon everyone was talking about the krizis: the liberals on Echo of Moscow, the propagandists on the television news, and then, all of a sudden, my grandmother. I was still staying home and waiting for my face to heal when she walked into my room and said, “Andrei, I have a question.”

She handed me a little booklet, just barely wider and taller than a credit card. It was from her bank, the state savings bank, and listed all her transactions from the last few years. At the beginning of the book they were recorded by hand, then at a certain point they started to be recorded by a little dot matrix printer—the bank clerks must have shoved the little book into the printer somehow.

My grandmother handed it to me now and said, “Andryush, how much money do I have?”

I studied the little document and determined that she had twelve thousand somethings—if it was dollars, it was a lot, but if it was rubles, it was not. Eventually I found the small print: it was rubles.

“You have twelve thousand,” I said.

“Dollars?”

“No. Rubles.”

She looked crestfallen.

Then, “How much is that?” She meant in dollars.

“Five hundred,” I said.

“Five hundred dollars?” Now she sounded impressed.

“Yes.”

“OK.”

She took her bankbook and left. The financial consultation was over. Then she returned.

“Andryush. Is my money in rubles or dollars?”

“Rubles.”

“Should I change it to dollars?”

Ah. The radio had frightened her with talk of the ruble’s collapse. But in fact it was too late. The ruble had already lost a tenth of its value. When I said she had five hundred dollars, I was rounding up. It used to be five hundred dollars. Now it was four-fifty. But the ruble could bounce back, for one thing, and also, this just wasn’t very much money. The hassle of going to the bank and getting this done far outweighed the potential losses from a further devaluation. So it seemed to me. For a day or two my grandmother relented, then we had the same scene all over again, and then after she concluded it was no use asking me, she started sitting in the kitchen doing little calculations on a sheet of paper. I looked at them once, but as far as I could tell they were just numbers being multiplied at random.

A few days later, on a Friday morning, with my face more or less back to normal, I made my triumphant return to the Coffee Grind. I was voraciously catching up on American views of the election, now just a few weeks away—the Russians hated McCain for his hawkishness and seemed optimistic that Obama would be a more reasonable American—when I got a Gchat from Dima.

“Hey, have you deposited the rent yet? It hasn’t shown up in my account.”

“No. Sorry. It’s been busy.”

“Can you do it today, please? The ruble is going to collapse over the weekend.”

Dima had wisely set the rent in dollars to isolate it from fluctuations in the exchange rate, but there was a hitch: Howard and the guys paid in rubles at the going rate on the first of the month, and in between their payment and my deposit lay danger. If the ruble were to collapse before I could get to the bank, Dima would lose money. Nine days had passed already since the first of the month. And Dima didn’t like losing money.

I said, “How do you know about the ruble?”

“Because I know!”

“I read that the Central Bank was defending the currency with all its might.”

“Listen, could you please just deposit the rent? By Monday morning the ruble is fucked.”

“OK, OK.”

“Thanks!”

But I was annoyed. If it was so important for Dima that his rent get deposited in a timely fashion, he should have set it up so that I didn’t have to drag our grandmother halfway across town to the HSBC. Furthermore, as I did not feel like explaining to Dima, over the past week with my swollen face it hadn’t seemed like a good time to go to the bank to perform a potentially illegal transaction.

After the Gchat, though, I figured I might as well do it. I finished up some student emails and headed home.

When I got there my grandmother was drinking tea in the kitchen. She always sat with her back to the door, facing the window, and sometimes she didn’t hear me come in.

“Hello!” I called out, so as not to frighten her.

She turned around in her chair and smiled. “Coo-coo!” she said happily. Her teeth were out, which gave her a look of childlike joy when she smiled. “You’re home early. Should I heat up lunch?”

And then I remembered—my grandmother’s life savings! She hadn’t mentioned it in a few days, but if the ruble collapsed she would never forgive me. I would never forgive myself.

“Listen,” I said now. “Do you want to convert your account into dollars?”

“What?”

“Your bank account. Do you want it to be in dollars?”

“Of course!”

She might have forgotten the devaluation but she knew that she had faith in the dollar.

“OK,” I said. “Let’s go to the bank.”

My grandmother put in her teeth, got dressed in her best slacks, a sweater, her pink coat and hat, and off we went. Her bank, Sberbank, the state bank, was just around the corner, and I figured we could go there first and then deposit Dima’s rent, which I brought with me.

But the Sberbank was packed. The branch was just too small—a row of cashiers’ windows and a narrow waiting space before them, maybe five feet deep. It was impossible to form any kind of line in that space, so people stood haphazardly wherever they could. “Who’s last in line?” I asked.

A bespectacled man in his fifties said he was.

“And all these people are in front of you?” I asked.

“That’s how a line works,” he confirmed.

“Then we’re after you,” I said, to complete the transaction. There was no telling how long this would take. I could have the guy hold my place in line and walk my grandmother home, but if the line was quicker than it looked I’d have to run after her soon and drag her back here again. Probably better to just wait it out. As I contemplated the possibilities, I heard my grandmother thanking someone; a woman had offered her the lone chair.

Now a woman came through the door, looked stoically at the long line, and asked who was last.

“I am,” I said.

“I’m after you,” she said. I nodded.

“Why are there so many people?” I asked the man who had been last before me, wondering if he’d also heard about the coming devaluation.