Keith Gessen - A Terrible Country

I tried to remember. Sarah had had an iPhone. “Two hundred dollars,” I said.

The guy’s eyes widened. He knew it! That was a third of the Russian price.

“But,” I hastened to add, “you have to get a contract. It’s about a hundred dollars a month. For two years. So, not cheap.”

“A contract?” This guy had never heard of a contract. Did I even know what I was talking about? In Russia you just bought a SIM card and paid by the minute.

“Yeah, in America you need a contract.”

The guy was offended. In fact he was beginning to wonder if I wasn’t just making this up. “There must be some way around that,” he said.

“I don’t think so.”

“No,” he said again. “There must be some way to get the phone and dump the contract.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “They’re pretty strict about that stuff.”

The guy shrugged, took out a paper— Kommersant, one of the business dailies—and didn’t say another word to me the rest of the way. A person who couldn’t figure out how to dump an iPhone contract was not worth knowing. But there was no gang of robbers waiting for me at the train station, and from there without further incident I took the metro a couple of stops to Tsvetnoi Boulevard.

The center of Moscow was its own world. Gone were the tall, crumbling apartment blocks of the periphery and the old, crumbling factories. Instead, as I stepped off the long escalator and through the big, heavy, swinging wood doors, I saw a wide street, imposing Stalin-era apartment buildings, some restaurants, and a dozen construction sites in every direction. Tsvetnoi Boulevard was right off the huge Garden Ring road, which ran in a ten-lane loop around the center, at a radius of about a mile and a half from the Kremlin. But as soon as I started up toward Sretenka Street, where my grandmother lived, I found myself on side streets that were quiet and dilapidated, with many of the two- and three-story nineteenth-century buildings unpainted and even, in August, partly abandoned. A group of stray dogs sunning themselves in an abandoned lot on Pechatnikov Lane barked at me and my hockey stick. And then in a few minutes I was home.

My grandmother’s apartment was on the second floor of a five-story white building in a courtyard between two older, shorter buildings, one of them facing Pechatnikov, the other Rozhdestvenskiy Boulevard. The courtyard’s fourth boundary was a big redbrick wall on whose other side was an old church. When I was a kid the courtyard had been filled with trees and dirt for me to play with, and even, during the winter, a tiny hockey rink, but after the USSR fell apart the trees were chopped down and the rink dismantled by neighbors who wanted to park their cars there. The courtyard was also, for a time, a popular destination for local prostitutes; cars would drive into it, run their lights over the merch, and make a selection without even getting out.

I entered that old courtyard now. The prostitutes were long gone, and though it was still basically a parking lot, the cars parked here were much nicer, and there were even a few more trees than last time I visited. I entered the code on the front door—it hadn’t changed in a decade—and lugged my suitcase up the stairs. My grandmother came to the door. She was tiny—she had always been small, but now she was even smaller, and the gray hair on her head was even thinner—and for a moment I was worried she wasn’t expecting me. But then she said, “Andryushik. You’re here.” She seemed to have mixed feelings about it.

I went in.

BABA SEVA—Seva Efraimovna Gekhtman, my maternal grandmother—was born in a small town in Ukraine in 1919. Her father was an accountant at a textile factory and her mother was a nurse. She had two brothers, and the entire family moved to Moscow not long after the Revolution.

I knew she had excelled in school and been admitted to Moscow State, the best and oldest Russian university, where she studied history. I knew that at Moscow State, not long after the German invasion, she had met a young law student, my grandfather Boris (really Baruch) Lipkin, and that they had fallen in love and been married. Then he was killed near Vyazma in the second year of the war, just a month after my mother was born. I knew that after the war my grandmother had started lecturing at Moscow State and consulted on the Ivan the Great film and received the apartment and lived there with my mother as well as an elderly relative, Aunt Klava; that the apartment had caused some turmoil in the family, not because of who it came from but because my grandmother refused to let her brother and his wife move in with her, because his wife drank and also because she did not want to displace Aunt Klava; that not long after receiving the apartment she had been forced out at Moscow State at the height of the “anti-cosmopolitan,” i.e., anti-Jewish, campaign, and that she had gotten by as a tutor and translator of other Slavic languages; and that she had remarried in late middle age, to a sweet, forgetful geophysicist whom we called Uncle Lev, and moved with him to the nuclear research town of Dubna, vacating the apartment for my parents, and then eventually my brother, before moving back here again, just a few years before I showed up, because Uncle Lev had died in his sleep.

But there was a lot I didn’t know. I didn’t know what had happened to Aunt Klava; nor what her life had been like after the war; nor whether, before the war, during the purges, she had had any knowledge or sense of what was happening in the country. If not, why not? If so, how did she live with that knowledge? And how did she live in this apartment with that knowledge once that knowledge came?

For the moment, as my grandmother busied herself in the kitchen, I put down my bags in our old bedroom—which, contrary to Dima’s promises, was still filled with his crap—and then took a quick look around. The apartment hadn’t changed: it was a museum of Soviet furniture, arranged in layers from newest to oldest, like an archaeological site. There was my grandmother’s grand old oak wood desk, in the back room, from the forties or fifties, as well as her locked standing shelf, also from that era; and then from my parents’ time in the apartment was most of the furniture: the green foldout couch, the glassed-in hanging shelves, and the tall lacquered standing closet. And of course, in our bedroom, our bunk beds, which my father had built not long before our emigration, and which Dima had not replaced; when he’d lived here he’d taken the back room for himself and used our room for guests. There were even a few childhood toys, mostly little cars, now tucked up among the books, that Dima and I had played with. After that came the modern age: Dima had installed a flat-screen in the back room, as well as an exercise bike in our bedroom that was taking up a lot of space. Most of the books on the shelves were Russian classics in their full Soviet editions—fourteen volumes of Dostoevsky, eleven of Tolstoy, sixteen (!) of Chekhov—though there were also some shelves filled with English-language books on business and deal making that Dima had apparently imported. And there was a linoleum-topped table in the kitchen, circa the year of my birth, at which my grandmother now sat, waiting for me.

For no good reason, I was her favorite. During summers when I was little I often stayed with her and Uncle Lev at their dacha in Sheremetevo (not far from the airport), and I had visited them as much as I could when I lived in Moscow during my college year abroad. In the late nineties, when she was still able to travel, she and Dima and I had taken an annual trip to Europe together. All this added up to just a few months together, total, and yet I was the younger and the favorite child of her only daughter, and this was enough. For her I was still that little boy.