Keith Gessen - A Terrible Country

Eventually they figured it out, my father went from good job to better, and my mother became one of the few literary Russians to actually find a literary job. We moved from Brighton to Brookline to aristocratic Newton. But through it all Dima flung himself at the frustrations and limitations of our new life. He denounced the Russians my parents hung out with as losers; he dismissed his new classmates as idiots. He had hated the Soviet Union, he said, but at least in the Soviet Union there were people you could talk to.

The only person he seemed to like was me. As he started making money in his first jobs in America—he got a job as a gas station attendant, which included, he told me proudly, both a wage and some tips—he always bought me little gifts and let me in on his theories about capitalism. He sought to enlist me in his ongoing battle with our parents, and let me in on all the (limited) family dirt.

As Dima moved out into the world—he left home the minute he turned eighteen, declared to my flabbergasted parents that he wasn’t going to college, and incorporated his first company before the year was out (they made some kind of video game)—I watched him with profound fascination. What was this new world and what could a Kaplan hope to do in it? How could you live? I had no idea. My parents were good people but they lived in a Russian ghetto. It wasn’t just their friends who were Russian, it was everyone: our doctor was Russian, our dentist was Russian, our car mechanic was Russian, the clown who came to our house for birthday parties was Russian, the guy who fixed the roof was Russian. How the fuck did they know so many Russian people? The thing is, I knew this world, this close-knit community, would not be available to me. It was as if, yes, my parents had emigrated, but only to the Russia that existed inside America; Dima and I would have to emigrate all over again into America itself. Dima was the one who went out into the world and figured it out. He was the advance party for the two of us. I did not have to do what he did—in fact in most ways I would do the exact opposite—but from him at least I could learn the possibilities. Until I was about sixteen there was no one I admired more.

Then our mother died. She got sick when I was a sophomore, endured the terrible treatments, and still died, two years later, in terrible pain. My brother was in New York by then, working on Wall Street, and he spent a week with us in Newton after the funeral. All of us were in shock, more, I think, than we even realized at the time.

With my mother gone, it was like our entire history, our emigration, our lives no longer made sense. She had been at the center of it, she and Dima. Now we scattered: I left for college; my father sold the house and moved to Cape Cod, eventually marrying an American woman and starting a new family; and Dima quit his job and moved to Moscow. I don’t know if he thought of his return as a rebuke to my parents or an homage to them. Maybe it was both.

I don’t know all the things that he got into while he was making his way in the new Russian capitalism. He would periodically report on this or that exciting foolproof scheme on his increasingly rare visits to the States—he was investing in a demolition company in anticipation of the destruction of Soviet housing stock; he was buying a warehouse for auto parts; he was chopping down forests outside Moscow and selling them to the Norwegians—and then the next time he came it was on to something else. It was the same with his wives and girlfriends. He got married and divorced before I was done with college, once more while I was in grad school, and was now married a third time.

It wouldn’t be right to say that I noticed some kind of change in him over time; I didn’t. He was the same person. But certainly as he became more successful and accrued more stuff, he became more himself. The Dima I had known growing up had been impatient, aggressive, and aggrieved—qualities that had made his teenage years a living hell for him and for our parents. But in Russia he found a suitable arena for these qualities. It was a place where being impatient and aggressive could pay off. I remember visiting him once, not long after I’d started grad school. He had just bought the apartment across the landing from our grandmother and was getting his floor replanked. The workers had done a less than perfect job—there was a slight gap between the last of the floorboards and the wall. By slight I mean a quarter of an inch—I would not have noticed it had Dima not pointed it out to me. Nonetheless when the contractor, a burly Russian guy in work overalls, came by to get paid, Dima laid into him. The work was shit, he yelled, and he wasn’t paying for it. “You and your incompetents are going to come back tomorrow and do the whole thing over again,” said Dima. The contractor, whose large belly was about at Dima’s chest, looked like he was considering taking a swipe at Dima. But he tried to make peace instead. “Why don’t we take up the two or three adjoining ones and fix those?” he said. “It’ll look the same.”

Dima smelled weakness. “You will take up every single board, do you understand me, you fucking bear?”

The contractor puffed up his chest for a moment and then deflated. He must have made a calculation: If he took a swipe at Dima, he wouldn’t get paid, he might get arrested, and maybe even worse—if someone this small was yelling this loudly, it must mean he had all sorts of protection behind him. “All right,” said the contractor dolefully, and the next day his workers came back and redid the entire job. The contractor even seemed to take something of a liking to Dima, who by this point was all sweetness and light.

“No hard feelings, OK?” said the contractor, offering his hand.

“Of course not,” said Dima, and meant it. The contractor was Stepan, who now fixed stuff for Dima, and sometimes (grudgingly) for me.

Eventually Dima’s fierceness won out over whatever flaws were inherent in the Russian free market, and he returned with some success to the moneymaking platform of his youth—gas stations. He built a small network of them, about ten, throughout Moscow and the Moscow region, and started making money. But then the Moscow–Petersburg highway project was announced, and with it a tender for the gas station contract. It was a large contract, twenty stations, plus the opportunity to sublease store space in the future rest stops—tens of millions of dollars, a whole new level for Dima. And here his problems began, because he wasn’t the only one who was interested. In the end, he lost the bid to our old friend RussOil, in what he claimed was a rigged process, and started raising a terrible fuss. That was about as much as I knew about it, and as far as I could tell that was why he’d had to leave the country.

My hope was that he’d straightened it out, one way or another—maybe his appearance on the radio was part of a tough negotiation—and would now be coming back.

When I told my grandmother that Dima was coming to visit, she freaked out.

“Where will he stay?” she said.

“In our room,” I said.

“Your room?”

I took my grandmother to my room to show her the bunk beds that we had once slept in as boys. I had played hockey for the first time the night before and left my stuff to dry, a little haphazardly, on the floor. And the rest of the room wasn’t exactly a model of cleanliness.

“Dima can’t stay here!” said my horrified grandmother.

“Half this junk is his!” I said, which was true. But it didn’t matter. “I’ll clean it up before he gets here,” I said.

“All right,” said my grandmother.

The next day—six days before Dima’s arrival—she came into my room. I had cleaned up some of it, but she was unsatisfied. “Andryush,” she said. “I’ve been thinking. Maybe you can move out of this room while Dima is here?”