Keith Gessen - A Terrible Country

“It’s always like this on Fridays,” he said. He thought a moment. “And other days too.”

In the end, we would wait for more than two hours. When it was finally our turn, an exhausted and irritated clerk converted my grandmother’s life savings to dollars and handed us a brand-new bankbook.

“Is that it?” my grandmother asked me as we walked away from the window.

“Yes,” I said. “You now have dollars.”

My grandmother, who was holding on to my arm, patted it. She was exhausted but pleased. It was not too late to go to Dima’s bank, but I couldn’t do it to her. She was much too tired. We went home and I spent the weekend at the Grind checking the news sites for word of the collapsing ruble. Instead, the news was still dominated by the American presidential race. Just in case, I turned off my Gchat so that my brother couldn’t yell at me. In the event, the ruble opened Monday even a little stronger than it had closed on Friday. We made the trip to HSBC first thing that morning and deposited Dima’s money. My delay had actually earned him some money, though I wasn’t going to harp on that, especially as, two weeks later, the ruble did have another bad day—Bad Tuesday—and slipped another 10 percent. But my grandmother’s life savings had ridden out the storm mostly intact.

In those first few weeks after getting hit in the face, every time I went out of the house I was skittish. I kept thinking I saw the guy who hit me, and my heart jumped: Should I run and confront him? If I did, would he hit me again? Once you realize that other people can physically harm you, with no warning or provocation, you start seeing things differently. I hated going out of the house those first weeks, though I had to get groceries and a couple of times I went for a jog so I wouldn’t get too depressed. This lasted, as I say, for a few weeks, but eventually it wore off. My heart stopped racing every time I saw a tall, blond guy on Sretenka or in the Coffee Grind. Anyway, I figured I’d be leaving soon.

Obama, I sensed, would win the election. I looked forward to returning to an enlightened, post-racial America just as soon as my brother came back.

In the meantime, in the aftermath of the ruble’s devaluation, I’d grown richer. My cappuccinos were now 20 percent off. Once or twice in the weeks after the devaluation, I even bought myself a sandwich. Live it up, Kaplan, I thought. Live it up.

ONE OTHER THING turned my way before Dima came to visit. My grandmother announced that she needed new slippers from Belarus. That she needed new slippers was true. Like all Russian people, my grandmother took her shoes off when entering her apartment and replaced them with slippers. Since she did perpetual laps around the apartment, the slippers were getting serious mileage, and it showed. The rub was that she liked her current slippers, and believed that they were from Belarus. So it had to be Belarusian slippers again.

This was not easy. There was a shoe store on Sretenka where I had bought my own slippers—they had a black insole and an argyle pattern; they were pretty cool slippers—but the store did not have anything from Belarus. I tried a few more stores in the neighborhood and came up empty. I wrote to Dima to ask if he knew where the supposedly Belarusian slippers came from and he said he didn’t, and couldn’t I just get our grandmother regular slippers? No, I could not, though I was beginning to wonder why. Her slippers were not so extraordinary; there were many Chinese and Russian and Ukrainian slippers just like them. But she insisted. A famous historian had once defined the Soviet people— Homo Sovieticus —as a “species whose most highly developed skills involved the hunting and gathering of scarce goods in an urban environment.” I had never developed these skills. It seemed unfair to demand of me that I develop them now.

Finally I confessed to my grandmother that I was having trouble finding Belarusian slippers. “Have you tried the market outside Olympic Stadium?” she asked. I had not. “Let’s go there,” said my grandmother, so we did.

Olympic Stadium was just one stop from us on the subway. It had been built for the 1980 Summer Olympics, the ones that had been boycotted by the West over the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and had hosted the boxing tournament (the Cubans won). In the 1990s, it had been taken over by small clothing stores, and though it was now active again as a stadium—Metallica was playing next month—the large open space in front of it had become a clothes market. We approached it from the Prospekt Mira (Peace Avenue) subway stop, across a large chaotic square that included a small church, a McDonald’s, and, cutting across the square, an active tramline. Periodically a tram would rumble through and people would clear out of the way for it. Moscow was crazy.

Eventually we reached a sea of little stalls. We toured them as quickly as we could, though my grandmother was in no hurry. She seemed, for once, to be having a good time. There were a fair number of dedicated shoe stalls, and my grandmother would go over and ask if they had any slippers from Belarus; after enough of them said no, she agreed to try on some slippers that were not from Belarus. Each of the little stalls had a stool she could sit on as she pulled off her loafers and experimented with some slippers. The salesladies were understanding. You spent half your life in slippers, after all. Choosing a pair was serious business.

My grandmother rejected all the slippers. This felt discouraging to me, but she didn’t mind. I guess we were shopping. After about an hour of this, we finally headed back to the metro. But I would not be relating this exciting tale were it not for what happened next. As we made our way through the square with the McDonald’s and tram tracks and church on it, I noticed two teenage girls ahead of us carrying gym bags and figure skates; they looked flushed, as if they’d just been skating. Ordinarily I’d have been too shy to say anything, but an hour of watching my grandmother try on slippers had apparently lowered my inhibitions. I hailed the girls and asked if there was an ice rink nearby. They said yes and pointed back toward the stadium. “If you bend around the stadium and under, it’s right there, across from the swimming pool.”

“Do they play hockey there?”

“I think late in the evenings, yes.”

If that was true, and if I could get into a skate there, it would signal a remarkable change in my fortunes—this place was really close to our house.

I went the next evening after my grandmother had gone to bed. I didn’t bring my Ikea bag full of stuff this time. The entrance was across from the pool, just as the figure skaters said, and it had the usual Moscow security guards in cheap black suits stationed at it. When I asked where the hockey rink was, they pointed me down the corridor, and when I asked if it was all right for me to go there, they shrugged. This meant yes. I walked down the hall, descended some stairs, noticed some locker rooms to my left, and then opened a metal door to find—a hockey rink. It was not a professional rink like at Sokolniki, there were no stands for thousands of fans, and since it was under the stadium it was something like a secret rink—but it was a hockey rink nonetheless, it had that smell of mildew mixed with sweat mixed with trapped cold air, and guys were playing hockey on it.

I decided this time that I’d check the locker rooms. One was locked, another was empty, but in the third I found two guys about my age, one big, blue-eyed, and bald—I later learned his name was Grisha—the other smaller, a little older, with dark blond hair and a mean look on his face—Fedya. They were both sitting down next to unopened hockey bags and taping their sticks. Hockey players.