Keith Gessen - A Terrible Country

“Andryush,” she said, “you’re home. I was worried. Where did you go?”

“I was out with Dima.”

“Dima? Is he here?”

“Yes.”

“He’s my grandson, you know,” said my grandmother sadly. “He lives in London now.”

“I know,” I said.

“Are you hungry?” she asked. “There’s some pancakes with jam. Do you want some?”

She started to pull herself up by the table and I stopped her. “I’ll get them,” I said.

The pancakes were on the windowsill—it was really more like a window alcove, it was two feet deep—in an aluminum dish, covered by another dish; my grandmother owned no Tupperware. I put two on a plate and came back to the table. My grandmother was slowly, methodically sipping her tea.

Dima and I had just spent I didn’t know how much money on those drinks. Thirty dollars? And Dima was no doubt going to spend quite a bit more. How much was Vera’s cleaning fee? Two hundred dollars? Five hundred? I had no idea, but five hundred struck me as plausible. That was the entirety of my grandmother’s life savings.

“My mother used to make these pancakes,” my grandmother said suddenly. “She wasn’t a good cook. She was a dancer. And she was very good at chess. She was one of the best female chess players in Moscow.”

I had never heard any of this before.

“Yes,” said my grandmother, “she was very talented but she didn’t like children. But once in a while we would come home from school and she’d be there and she’d have these pancakes for us to eat.”

My poor little grandmother, I thought. She had lived such a long life, but she still remembered her mother’s pancakes.

It was wrong that she was alone like this. And it happened because we had emigrated. It didn’t seem that way at the time—at the time it was a great adventure—but by leaving we had ruptured the generations. We had abandoned my grandmother. It took a while to unspool all its ramifications, but that emigration, more than anything, was the great tragedy of my grandmother’s life.

“Do you want to play anagrams?” I asked her.

Her eyes widened. “Of course!” she said. And we played three games. She slaughtered me. Then we went to sleep. Whenever it was Dima came home, I did not hear him.

The next morning I wrote to the drummer that my plans had changed, and if he hadn’t yet made other arrangements, he could stay. He wrote back right away to say that he hadn’t, and would be happy to stay.

Telling Dima was more difficult, but—uncharacteristically for me, it must be said—I decided not to put it off. I told him I wanted to stay a few more months, that I was just getting started here, and that I didn’t think we should move my grandmother while I was still around to help. He took it better than I expected. “All right,” he said. “If you’re here to help her up the stairs, we save on a caretaker, so fine. But if the place loses value, I’m taking it out of your end.”

“OK,” I said.

Dima was in Moscow an entire week. We ran a couple of household errands together and watched the election returns come in, and Obama’s speech, on his computer, but other than that I hardly saw him. He slipped in and out of the apartment like a ghost, either very early in the morning or very late at night. He was avoiding my grandmother, I think, and she could tell. Every time she saw him, she said, “Dima! I’m so proud of you! You’ve made such a great career for yourself! We heard you on the radio! If only you would come see me once in a while! I’m right here!”

“Grandma, I have to go,” Dima would say, looking at his phone and putting on his coat and boots and hat. “We’ll talk about this later, OK?”

“Can’t you stay a little bit?” my grandmother would say. “We’ll play anagrams.”

“I can’t right now.”

“Just one game?”

“I can’t.”

“You never can.”

“I’m very busy!”

The more she pressed, the more he pulled away. I recognized the dynamic. He thought she was criticizing him, minimizing or even ignoring all the time he had spent with her over the years, all the attention he had given her, whereas she was merely stating a wish and also, I now saw, helplessly trying to think of something to say. There was Dima. What to say to him? And the first thing that came out was always some kind of rebuke. She was just trying to make conversation, to get him to stick around a moment longer, to engage.

I watched it and became so sad. Perhaps I could do things differently. Dima was going to leave. But I was going to stay.

AFTER DIMA LEFT it grew cold. First it was a little cold, but one could manage, and after that it was a little colder—and then it became very, very cold.

It wasn’t a wet cold, and there wasn’t a lot of wind. It was just really fucking cold. Ten degrees Fahrenheit was ordinary. If it got down to zero, that was tough. If it got up to twenty, people loosened their collars and took off their hats.

On an average day, before leaving the house, you had to wonder: Will I freeze to death? Anywhere you wanted to go, you were going to end up walking. The city was very big. The streets were very wide. As you walked there wouldn’t be any pockets of warmth to hide in. What if you fell? What if you got lost or discouraged? In blockaded Leningrad during the war people would just collapse on the street from hunger and cold and that was it. Others would step over them. Eventually someone would come to collect the frozen body.

After a week of this cold I made the determination that the winter coat with which I’d been making do in New York wouldn’t cut it, and with my grandmother’s permission I raided the standing closet in the back room. There to my amazement I found a green telogreyka , literally “body warmer.” I had seen them in old photos of Soviet workers, including in the Gulag—they were work jackets with a green outer lining stuffed with cotton wool batting. Most important, they were warm. Uncle Lev must have gotten one while working at an oil field. And it must have been when he was a younger, more robust man, because when I tried it on it fit me perfectly. I now had a winter jacket, albeit one in a somewhat hipsterish vein. There was also a red hiking backpack with the word CПОРТ on the back into which I could, with some creative arranging, fit all my hockey stuff. I discarded my Ikea bag and from there on out made my way to hockey with a nice red Soviet backpack.

Soon I was going to hockey a lot. Our team was getting badly beaten by the white team each Wednesday and Friday, and yet I couldn’t get enough. I was dazzled by the white team. They were not, individually, superskilled players, but they had played together a long time and they knew how to use the large ice surface. Their breakout (from the defensive zone) was different from anything I had ever seen. Growing up, our breakouts had been simple: as the defenseman got the puck down low, the wings waited near the blue line, and if they were open, they received the first pass, which they redirected either to the center or up the boards; if the wings were covered, the center looped back toward the goal and received a short pass from the defenseman and tried to go from there. The white team played a longer game: they sent their wings to the opposite blue line and then had them curl back toward the puck; the defenseman rifled the puck to the wing coming back, and the wing redirected it to the center coming out of the zone. It was in certain ways the same play—the defenseman passed to the wing, who passed to the center—and in this variation the center received the puck just a few feet farther along than in the breakout I was accustomed to. But both the players and the puck traveled a greater distance, and this in itself was valuable, as it stretched the defense and made the ensuing attack more difficult to defend. And it required a skill in passing—both in making passes and in receiving them—that was remarkable. With one exception—a pudgy young forward named Alyosha—the white players were not fast, but every single one of them was a good passer. Alyosha played with Fedya, whom I had met on my very first day and who I’d since learned was the owner of a small chain of restaurants in the city center, and consequently a man who had to deal with all sorts of criminal and semi-criminal organizations. Fedya had a preternatural sense of where everyone was. Perhaps he had developed it while looking out for the mob. Now he used it to deliver the puck to Alyosha quietly, swiftly, and with deadly accuracy. Then Alyosha scored. We were powerless to stop them.