Keith Gessen - A Terrible Country

But maybe I could stop them, I thought, if I could just get better. Every time someone mentioned a different skate, provided that it was in the evening, I would go. “There’s a game on Saturday nights near the Kyrgyzia movie theater,” one of our defensemen, Ilya, said one day. “Three hundred rubles. Want to come?” I did. It was way out on the edge of the city, at the last stop on the yellow line, just past the movie theater, and the locker room was a little shed in the parking lot. There weren’t any showers. But the ice was good, the price was half what we paid at Olympic Stadium, and the guys were friendly—they were simpler, poorer, and some of them had gold teeth. They laughed a lot, looked forward to heading for their dachas (even in the dead of winter) and to drinking some beer. After I found this game, I also found a third, on Mondays: it was at the Institute of Physical Culture, which I later learned was the birthplace of Soviet hockey; the rink was decrepit, with poor heating in the locker rooms, and on the ice a gulley several inches wide along the boards, where if the puck fell in you had to stand there and fish it out. I didn’t care. I wanted more hockey. Soon I was playing six nights a week. The puck began to stick to my blade. The ice came to seem a more natural place to be than the ground.

Traveling all over to play hockey, I saw the strangest things. Once you left the center of the city—which, to be sure, had its own strangenesses—but once you escaped the immediate vicinity of the Kremlin, it was as if civilization fell away. Or rather it was as if some other civilization—the Soviet one—had come here, like the glaciers of the Ice Age, and erected its massive apartment towers, twelve and sixteen stories high, some of them the length of an entire block, some of them so long that the builders had slightly curved them, as if taking into account the curvature of the Earth. And then, like the glaciers, this Soviet civilization retreated. Now a new civilization had taken over these decrepit apartment blocks and erected its own monuments: car garages, giant ugly shopping malls, horrible mazelike markets the size of airports. But also, to make up for all that: hockey rinks. For one skate, on Sundays, I had to take the subway as far as it would go, get on a crowded trolleybus, walk through a semi-apocalyptic landscape along a raised highway and a massive aboveground gas line, before finally arriving at the rink, which was nestled between some apartment blocks as if it were a secret.

There were streets out here, and sidewalks, but most people and cars ignored them. All the spaces between the apartment blocks had been converted into streets. If it was not a house, it was a street; if not a street, then a house. That was all.

Going out into the exurbs like this—riding the metro to its last stops, transferring to a bus, and still having to walk through a barren landscape—was revelatory. This is how most of the people in the city lived. The distances were unbelievable. No wonder they were always in such a lousy mood.

I never felt unsafe when going out to these places, though there were always some drunk people hanging around, and occasionally I’d see gangs of teens looking for trouble. I was still a little skittish from getting hit in the face with a gun. But for one thing, the guy who’d hit me with a gun had jumped out of a black Mercedes SUV, and there weren’t a lot of those rolling through the courtyards and onto the sidewalks of outer Moscow; out here you got more of a taste of what Russian auto manufacturing had been up to (mostly it was making cars that looked like Hyundais and cheap compact Fords). And for another thing, I had a hockey stick in my hands and I knew how to use it. So I kept going, and playing, and getting better.

Even so, we couldn’t beat the white team. There were just so many of them, and no matter how fast I got, the puck was always faster. It didn’t help that my team sucked. I remember one time during this period—I was probably in the best shape of my hockey life postcollege—when I got the puck in the neutral zone and saw that Grisha was on his way. I sent the puck against the boards, sidestepped Grisha, and picked the puck up again on the other side; but now Grisha’s partner, Sasha, the most violent person on their team (Grisha was merely the most dirty), was coming at me. There was no escaping this one; just before he made contact, I managed to slip the puck through his legs to my right wing, Anton, who was charging beside me. Sasha clobbered me to the ice but Anton was in alone. Then he blew it. He chugged in, awkwardly hugging the puck, and as the goalie went down, shot it over the net.

“What the fuck d’you do that for?” Oleg, my left wing, asked him when we were back on the bench.

“I was trying to get it over him,” said Anton.

“You just have to hit the net, you asshole.”

“I was trying! And where were you? Andrei was getting fucked over there and where were you?”

“Fuck you,” said Oleg.

And so on. They always yelled at each other, never at me. And of course we lost again.

Walking to hockey in the cold, my breath visible before me, I thought about money. I had never not thought about money, but until now it had been in the nature of a game: Could I make do on $25,000 in New York? What about $22,000? And so on. But it had never seemed like a crime on my part that I didn’t have money. Now it did. If I could only buy out my brother’s share of the apartment, my grandmother wouldn’t have to move. But there was no way I could get my hands on that much money, and it was just a matter of time before he kicked her out.

At hockey—my original hockey, where we kept getting whipped by the white team—the guys talked about money. I tried to follow their conversation in case it yielded useful advice. This was not easy. I had grown up speaking Russian with my parents, I’d been in the country speaking nothing but Russian for three months, and still I had trouble keeping up. The problem was their cursing. They did not merely curse; they replaced ordinary words with curses. Verbs were the most common victims. “I’ve been taking my rubles and cunting them across the border,” Tolya said once. “They fuck there for a while, and I cock them back here again.” I think Tolya was describing a simple currency maneuver, changing rubles to euros to take advantage of the faltering ruble. But I couldn’t be sure.

With the exception of Sergei, our goalie, who drove an old Russian car and hardly spoke in the locker room, the hockey guys all worked in some kind of business. Oleg, my left wing, owned property that he leased out; Anton, my right wing, was a corporate lawyer; Tolya was a banker; Vanya owned a sugar factory; and Ilya was CEO of an agricultural concern. They drove expensive German cars. But they were not like Dima’s friends—they were cruder, less educated, and they were not already spiritually half in the West. They were Russian, they had made their money in Russia, and they were going to die Russians, even if they died in a house they’d bought on the southern coast of Spain.

The guys traveled a lot, and not just to fuck rubles. They knew the flight schedule from Moscow to Frankfurt as well as businessmen in Boston know the Delta shuttle schedule to New York. But they were not under the illusion that they belonged anywhere but where they were.

“Frankfurt is a fucking airport,” Tolya said. “I like to get there early for my flights and fuck a beer or two.”

“Frankfurt is nice, but have you been to Istanbul?” said Vanya. “I fucked through there on my way to Dubai last year and I just cocked out. The fucking Turks! I was ashamed, to be honest. You’d be cunted to find a hotel in Russia with furniture as nice as they had at this fucking airport.”