Keith Gessen - A Terrible Country

“Yes,” said Anton. “That’s what happens when half of every dollar doesn’t get cunted. You can fuck something nice.”

There were so few actual words that sometimes the guys themselves got confused. “Everything in Germany is cunted,” Vanya said at one point. My understanding was that “cunted” usually meant “bad,” but the way Vanya said it, drawing it out, “cuuunted,” like he was impressed, left room for interpretation.

“You mean good cunted or bad cunted?” Anton asked.

“Good cunted!” Vanya said. He thought about it for a second and added: “If I’d said things in Russia were cunted, that would mean bad.”

Everybody laughed.

“What do you say, Seryoga?” Ilya addressed our goalie, Sergei. He was putting on his red CCCP goalie shirt. “In the USSR things were different, no?”

Sergei smiled. “W-w-well yeah,” he said. “Things were stable. You guys wouldn’t have to worry about cunting your rubles. You could sleep well at night and think about hockey.”

“You’re right,” said Tolya, standing up. “It’s time to play some hockey.”

We went out and played and lost, 8 to 1.

There was no way I’d ever earn enough money to buy Dima out. A hundred and fifty thousand dollars was a hundred and fifty PMOOC classes—it would take me twenty years. Even if I got a real professor job with a real professor salary I’d be making only about sixty or seventy grand a year. If I miraculously saved half my salary it would still take five years. By then it would be too late.

Still, getting an academic job wouldn’t hurt. A couple of times a week there was a lecture or reading by a writer or scholar at a bookstore/bar called Bilingua, and I started attending these. I listened to talks on the use of Pushkin in Soviet propaganda; the concept of “Ukraine” in nineteenth-century Russian thought; and the “indigenization” campaign in the Soviet ethnic republics in the 1920s. All of it was interesting, and though nothing was quite up my alley, I felt like there might be some kernel of a project for me to pick up. One evening I came home from a lecture—they were always at six, i.e., when my grandmother became most restless—to find that she was gone. Her slippers were by the door, her coat was not on the rack, there was no note on the kitchen table. She had just up and left.

This was not totally without precedent. My grandmother still did her own grocery shopping, though with the onset of the cold she was more likely to ask me to do it. She would occasionally go for a walk in the neighborhood by herself. A few times I had returned from the Coffee Grind to find her gone, and yet she had returned safely. But it had not been her practice to leave by herself during the evenings. As I was thinking this through I got a call from Emma Abramovna. “Andrei,” she said, “is Seva there?” My grandmother had told Emma Abramovna that she was coming over. But she was supposed to have been there an hour ago. It was not like my grandmother to be late.

I hung up in a panic, put my telogreyka back on, and rushed outside. I ran down to Tsvetnoi Boulevard, which was on the way to Emma Abramovna’s, in case my grandmother had failed to hail a car and just started walking. Nothing. I ran back to Clean Ponds in case she had started walking in the wrong direction: nothing. I even ran down to the police station on Sretenka, where I was greeted by a fresh-faced young cop who was obviously perplexed by my Gulag coat—the only other person I’d seen wearing one like it was the guy who ate from our dumpster—but nonetheless took my number and said they’d call me if they found a confused elderly lady in the neighborhood. Eventually I decided that the best place for me to be was at home, in case she called, and about twenty minutes after I returned I heard her key scratching at the door. I ran out and found my grandmother half frozen to death and frightened. She had hailed a cab, she told me, as I covered her with a blanket and gave her hot tea, but there had been a lot of traffic, and the driver had left the usual route to Emma Abramovna’s. My grandmother found that she did not remember the address. They got hopelessly lost and drove around central Moscow for a while. Finally she gave up, and the driver started heading back in this direction. She had caught an actual taxi, a rarity in Moscow and significantly more expensive than an ordinary private car, and she saw that the meter was approaching a thousand rubles. “But we never reached our destination,” she said to the driver.

“That’s not my fault,” he said. The ride to Emma Abramovna’s usually cost one hundred rubles, and my grandmother had only five hundred with her. She told this to the driver, who told her to get out. She knew how to get home from there, but it was almost a mile, and it was cold. As she told this story Emma Abramovna called and my little grandmother picked up the phone and started telling her what happened. Then she became exhausted and said she’d call her back. When she got off the phone, she began to cry. She sat in her chair at the kitchen table, cradling the phone receiver, and cried.

After that I stopped attending the lectures at Bilingua. I could see them some other time. If my grandmother wanted to go to Emma Abramovna’s, I went along. I even cut down a little bit on my hockey playing, though the games at Olympic Stadium were late enough at night that they never interfered with something my grandmother and I might be doing.

Of course we kept losing to the white team, and I felt increasingly frustrated. During one game not long after my grandmother’s terrible adventure, I got the puck from Oleg at the top of the slot. I should have taken a wrist shot but I was feeling angry. I wound up for a slap shot instead. When my stick hit the ice it broke in half. The top half stayed in my hands, the bottom half went flying into the corner, and the puck dribbled feebly toward the goal. Anton loaned me his stick for the remainder of the game. In the locker room afterward he asked if I wanted to cut the stick down so it was my size and keep it. I did not like the lie on his blade but a new stick would cost $150. “Yes,” I said. “Thank you.” And from then on I played with Anton’s shitty stick.

IWENT ACROSS the hall once in a while to have a beer with the soldiers, but I never went out with them again after the incident at Teatr, and in general my social life was pretty barren. Periodically, Dima’s friend Maxim invited me to a party or art opening. I never went. I knew that if I went out with that crowd there would always come a moment when I would be called upon to chip in fifty dollars for a bar or restaurant tab, and that it would mean I wouldn’t be able to go to the Coffee Grind for a week. Also, I was embarrassed about trying to kiss Elena. So I stayed home.

I was perplexed by the hockey guys. That they rarely exchanged pleasantries or smiled was now something I was accustomed to—Vanya once tried to smile at me, as a way of making me feel at home, and instead resembled a wolf flashing his teeth. But it was odd that they never wanted to have a beer. In America it was traditional to have some beers in the locker room after a skate, even if you didn’t know the people you were skating with; if you played with guys for a while, you’d eventually go and drink at a bar and learn things about them. In Russia, where you could sometimes end up drinking with people you just met on the street, I figured we’d be having beers in no time. But it never happened. One evening I decided to force the issue and brought some beers with me, to see if anyone wanted one. All the guys politely declined, and I carried the beers home with me like an idiot.