Keith Gessen - A Terrible Country

He paused to see what effect this was having.

I said, “That’s not good.”

“No, it’s not. Now that they have me by the nuts they’re going to take my stations; if I don’t give them up, they’re going to continue with a criminal prosecution. So I’m getting out.”

“What?” I didn’t quite understand.

“I’m not coming back. This is it. I’m done with this place.”

I had not expected this. “You’re just going to leave?”

“Yes. What do you want me to do?”

“I don’t know!” I said. I didn’t know, of course. “Stay? Fight?”

“And get put in prison like Khodor?” Khodor was Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the oligarch who stayed and fought and had been in prison, by that point, for five years. “No, thanks.”

“OK,” I said. I wasn’t going to argue with him about it.

“So here’s the thing,” said Dima. Apparently what he’d said until then was just a prelude. “How long are you planning on staying?”

“Here? I was planning on staying until you came back. I thought it was going to be soon.” A pathetic note of reproach entered my voice, though I tried to suppress it. “I already told my subletter I need my room back.”

“OK, great,” said Dima. “Do you still want to do that?”

“Well, I don’t know. I—why?”

“Because my legal bills are insane, and I need to start liquidating assets. And I want to start with the ones that are the least devalued right now.”

“OK.” I didn’t see what this had to do with me.

Dima said, “The least devalued assets are real estate.”

“What?” It was more the way he said it than what he said that made me realize what he was talking about. “Do you mean the apartment?”

Dima nodded.

I said, “Isn’t it also down?”

“Not like my other stuff. Have you seen the MICEX?”

“What’s that?”

“The stock exchange, professor. It’s down eighty percent. Eighty! The apartments are down ten, fifteen at most. I’m not moving on those shares until they’re back.”

“But you can’t sell Grandma’s apartment. It’s not yours!”

“It is, actually. It’s in my name and I have power of attorney. And it’s the best thing for her. She can’t get up those stairs much longer, and this will give us some cash on hand to hire someone to take care of her.”

“She’s been in that apartment practically her entire life.”

“What does that matter? She can’t remember what she had for breakfast.”

“But she knows where stuff is. She can orient herself.”

“We’ll set up the new place with her stuff, we’ll put it in the same places. Like at Emma Abramovna’s.”

I thought a second. “Why don’t you sell your own apartment?”

“Oh, I will,” said Dima. “But the buyer I have wants both apartments so he can combine them. He’s willing to pay a premium for that.”

“No,” I said. “You can’t do that to her.”

“ I can’t?” Dima looked at me like he was studying something on my nose. “I’m sorry. I must have missed all your contributions to Grandma’s health and well-being these past fifteen years. Did you do them in secret?” Dima paused as if waiting for an answer. “No? You didn’t? So you haven’t actually been here all this time, and you haven’t actually set foot in this country in however many years, and you don’t actually know anything about what’s going on? I thought so.”

He sat back momentarily with his expensive drink. It had an orange peel in it. He was so much older than me that we had never wrestled or fought the way brothers do, and anyway he wasn’t the wrestling type. He was all brain, and the brain was devoted to maximizing profit and proving he was right. And in this instance he was right. I’d been in America all this time. My grandmother had descended into senility without me. That I had finally showed up didn’t change that.

I asked, “When are you planning on doing this?”

“As soon as possible. If you leave around Thanksgiving, that would be great, we could probably get three hundred for the place. I might need to borrow a hundred out of it for my legal fees. The rest, two hundred thousand, we put in a Grandma fund—for renting her a place, hiring a live-in nurse, and any medical expenses that she incurs in the coming years. If her burn rate is about three thousand a month, that’s, what, sixty-six months, five and a half years. That’s a long time for her.”

“Yeah,” I said. Our grandmother was not going to live another five and a half years.

“Half that money is yours and I should be able to get it back to you within two to three years. We can draw up a contract.”

“I don’t need any money.”

“OK, Mr. Moneybucks. We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.”

I sat in silence. I had been looking forward to going back but this was different; if I left, it would mean my grandmother having to move to some random place.

“So what do you think?” said Dima.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I need to think about it.”

“OK,” said Dima. “Think about it.”

He then made some gesture that I didn’t catch, and one of the girls came over and sat in Dima’s lap. She was topless, and she clearly knew Dima; he whispered something in her ear and she laughed. He turned to me. “Vera says she has a friend who’d like to meet you. Should we invite her over?” Then he added, in English, “It’s on me.”

Part of me wanted to take him up on it but another part did not. In any case I was too confused by Dima’s news. I thanked Vera and Dima and said I was going to head home. Dima shrugged. “See you there,” he said, and that was the end of our conversation.

I took a roundabout way home so I could clear my head. The evenings were growing colder. I was in a sweater and a fall coat but it was not enough. Until now I had been so eager to leave. I walked past the expensive cafés that I didn’t like, the Hugo Boss, the experimental theater… . I was just getting used to this place. And I had maybe found a hockey game. But maybe too it was for the best. I was not exactly the world’s greatest caretaker of my grandmother.

Did I think Dima should stay? I mean, between going to prison and leaving, of course he should leave. But it didn’t sit well with me somehow. There had always been a kind of moral argument that Dima made alongside his moneymaking. He wasn’t just coming to Russia to make a killing; he was coming to build capitalism, democracy, a modern nation. He was continuing the work begun by the great Soviet dissidents whom my parents so admired. That’s why he could get so high and mighty on Facebook or when Elena interviewed him on Echo. It’s why he could sleep with strippers and still think of himself as a righteous dude—he was building the new Russia! Of course he had to blow off some steam! Now he was leaving. And that was OK. But if the idea had been to build something, and it was still unbuilt… did that mean the idea had never been to build anything at all?

Maybe I was being unfair. But one saw the same thing in academia. People came to Russia, interviewed Russians, wrote their articles and books—and then they got a job, or tenure, or the Nobel Prize, and what did the Russians get from it exactly? All this money that the Russians now had, it wasn’t from Dima coming over and building gas stations, and it sure as hell wasn’t from some academic writing articles. It was from Uncle Lev and the great Jewish-Italian defector Pontecorvo figuring out the goddamn molecular nature of oil. It was from Uncle Lev building instruments to detect neutron emissions. No Americans ever came over and showed the Russians how to find their oil; the Russians did it all on their own.

When I got home, my grandmother was in the kitchen in her nightgown, drinking a cup of tea. She had her teeth out and gave me a toothless smile when I sat down across from her. She always looked very cute without her teeth, like a very old, wise, gray-haired baby.