Keith Gessen - A Terrible Country

At least I understood why Solzhenitsyn was yelling. But why were my fellow grad students so sad? We weren’t in the Gulag. You’d think this realization would have made them happy.

“Why such a long face?” I finally said one time as Fishman was going on and on about how terrible the camps were. “We’re in New York. Look outside!”

“It’s important to bear witness to this suffering,” said Fishman. “It’s the least we can do.”

So I was, I thought, done with the Gulag and hesitant to start in on Shalamov. But almost the first thing I learned about him—from an edition of his memoirs I found at the bookstore under the strip club—was that he hated Solzhenitsyn. This was encouraging. He had, it turned out, a different vision of the camps. He wasn’t bitter about them. He did not seek vengeance in this life for the misfortunes that had befallen him, in part because he knew that many of the men who had harmed him in the camps had themselves been harmed much worse by others—they had been shot, or tortured, or beaten to death, just as they had beaten others to death. He had no interest in preaching about the meaning of his time in the camps. But he did want to record it. From this, people could draw their own conclusions. You might say that Shalamov had a touching belief in the power of art.

I had Shalamov on the table, then, when my grandmother came into the kitchen and asked me what I was reading. I showed her the book.

“Shalamov,” she said sadly. “Yes.”

She sat down across from me.

“Klavdia Giorgievna knew him,” she said.

I had never heard of a Klavdia Giorgievna but somehow I figured it out. “Aunt Klava?” I said.

“Yes. She was in Kazakhstan.”

“I didn’t know that,” I said. I had not known that.

“She wasn’t anyone’s aunt, of course,” said my grandmother.

“What?”

“I told people she was my aunt. From Pereyaslavl’. I even told Yolka that.”

This was correct. Aunt Klava, who had lived in the apartment when my mother was growing up, had died before my parents were married, so I’d heard very little about her. My understanding was that she’d survived the war in Ukraine and then come to Moscow alone.

“Her husband was a big Hungarian communist,” my grandmother said now. “He came to build Communism. They gave him this apartment. Then they arrested him. And Klavdia Giorgievna too. He died, but she survived. And then she came back.

“We were already living here. With Yolka. She came back and I didn’t know what to do. It had been her apartment.”

Somehow I had never thought about the fact that for my grandmother to receive a Stalin apartment, someone else had to lose it.

“So we agreed that I’d keep the apartment but she could live here in the meantime. She lived in your room and helped me with Yolka. She was a wonderful woman, a doctor.”

“I didn’t know,” I said.

“No one knew. I didn’t even tell Yelochka. I didn’t want her to have to lie to people. And then when it no longer mattered it was too late.”

My grandmother played with the little iron saltcellar on the table.

“I sometimes think I should have moved out then and there,” she said. “The minute she showed up, I should have left. Andryush, what do you think?”

What did I think? Who cares what I thought? And yet I had noticed this happening more and more—my grandmother treating me like someone who could be appealed to for moral guidance.

“I don’t know,” I said. I was still taking in the news about Aunt Klava. “You also needed somewhere to live.”

“That’s true.”

“And…” I began, thinking of what to say. A whole ethics had grown up around Stalinism that was, at times, hard to parse. Solzhenitsyn, who had suffered so mildly in the camps, had declared the principle “Do not live a lie,” meaning, “Do not participate in the deceptions of the regime.” This would certainly include taking an apartment from Stalin for your work on a propaganda film and staying in it after the repressed former owner returned. My grandmother had lived a lie. But what did Solzhenitsyn do? He proclaimed his principle; he won the Nobel Prize; then in his later years he cozied up to Putin, surrendering in one widely televised smile (Putin came to visit him) the moral authority it had taken him fifty years to build.

I had been reading Shalamov. What would Shalamov say? Shalamov saw things differently from Solzhenitsyn. He saw them doubly, ambivalently. He thought Solzhenitsyn was a windbag. Physical pain, hunger, and bitter cold: these could not be “overcome” by the spirit. Nor did the world divide neatly, as it did for Solzhenitsyn, between friends and enemies of the regime. For Shalamov, in the camps there were people who helped him and there were people who brought him harm (who beat him, stole his food, ratted him out), but the majority of the people he encountered did neither. They were just, like him, trying to survive. There was great brutality in the camps, and very little heroism. In his memoirs he told a remarkable story about learning, at one of the darkest moments of his camp life, that his sister-in-law, Asya, with whom he was close, was in a nearby camp. Shalamov was in the hospital with dysentery, and one of the doctors wanted to know if he wished to send Asya a message. Only half alive, Shalamov scribbled her a short and unsentimental note. “Asya,” it said, “I’m very sick. Send some tobacco.” That was all. Shalamov clearly remembered this with shame, but also with understanding: he was weak, on the edge of death, and had been reduced to a bare animal existence. There was no great lesson in this, except that in certain conditions a man quickly ceases to be a man.

It was nothing personal, as the saying goes. Just the twentieth century. I now wondered if, having learned this fact, I was under an obligation to contact Aunt Klava’s relatives and try to return the apartment to them. But I put it out of my mind. My grandmother had discharged the debt when she housed Aunt Klava. At least, as far as such debts could be discharged.

So I did not know what to say to my grandmother. She had lived a lie but she had done so alone and in silence, in order that no one else should have to live it as well. To me this was courageous. But that her conscience still worried her, that it was, maybe, part of what animated her and kept her alive—that was not something I should try to eliminate. Though at the same time it was OK for me to try.

“You earned this apartment,” I said. “You earned it by working on that movie. And when Aunt Klava came back, you opened your door to her.”

“Yes,” my grandmother reluctantly agreed.

“Not a lot of people would have done that,” I ventured. People released from the camps often did not have permission to return to Moscow, and certainly not to move back into their old apartments. Aunt Klava was probably breaking the law by coming back, and my grandmother protected her.

“That’s true,” said my grandmother. “Unfortunately,” she said with certainty, “that’s true.”

Now she looked sad again, but only in her usual way.

“You see, Andryushik,” she said, “all my friends have died. All my relatives have died. I am all alone.”

“You’re not entirely alone,” I said.

“No,” she insisted. “I am.”

It was weird. After conversations like this, and at other times—while we were watching the nightly news together, or playing anagrams, or just sipping tea after lunch—I felt that she had accepted my presence there, however finite, as a real and solid thing. It was rarely something in particular that I did for her that she appreciated; it was just my showing up. When I would get dressed to go to the Coffee Grind, or out for some groceries, she never failed to express admiration. “Andryush, I’m so impressed with you,” she’d say. “You are so tall.”