Keith Gessen - A Terrible Country

“I mean,” he was saying now, “the thing to do is get an appointment in Slavic and then start your own ‘research center.’ Those things are the biggest scams going. But it makes the university feel like it’s engaging in contemporary debates.” My mother had worked at a research center. It was a precarious existence, but hardly a scam.

Fishman! Sarah wasn’t my girlfriend anymore, obviously. But it was also the case that Fishman had a thing for other people’s girlfriends. It was something he talked about, back when we’d still been friends, during our first year in the department. During our second year this predilection caused everyone a lot of trouble: Fishman, at a party, made out with the drunk visiting girlfriend of a first-year student named Jake, who was from Wisconsin. This was one of the nice things about Slavic grad school—people came from all over the place, it wasn’t just the children of Russian immigrants. And I don’t know how someone not from Wisconsin would have handled it, but Jake, who was a head taller than Fishman, grabbed him by the collar without saying a word and flung him down on the floor and left the party, with his remorseful and now slightly less drunk girlfriend trailing behind. All this would have been unfortunate and upsetting, but still within the bounds of the sort of stuff that happens at grad school, had Fishman not then complained to the department about the “physical assault,” saying that he now felt “unsafe” at school with poor Jake. My adviser was then head of the department, and he tried his best to talk Fishman into dropping the whole thing. “As long as you stay out of people’s relationships,” my adviser said to him, “you’ll be perfectly safe.” But Fishman was adamant—it was a matter of principle, he said—and took his case to the university disciplinary board. As a result, Jake was kicked out of school for a year, and my adviser was officially rebuked by the university for not responding more promptly to a student’s concerns about his physical safety. My adviser took the whole thing philosophically—“I’ll tell you what creates an unsafe environment—that rat Fishman!”—and at the end of the year resigned from his position as department head, which in a way he was all too happy to have the excuse to do. But Jake did not return after his enforced sabbatical. I was still friends with him on Facebook, but he didn’t post there very often.

So that was Fishman. Ever since the Jake incident I kept waiting for him to be punished, to get his comeuppance from the just and vengeful God of Slavic Studies, but it just never seemed to happen. There were a few jobs that he didn’t get, to be sure, because at the end of the day you could only snow so many people with your fashionable work on digitizing the Gulag, but he always seemed to land on his feet. He had finished his dissertation a year before I did and gone on a Fulbright to Moscow; then he’d started his post-doc at Princeton. He was luxuriating in it now. “It’s such a supportive atmosphere,” he was saying. “Whether you’re new faculty or old faculty, it’s all the same—a very collegial place.”

I listened to Fishman but stole as many glances as were not obviously inappropriate at the girl next to him. Was it possible that in addition to Sarah, Fishman was also seeing her? For the first few minutes of dinner I tried to convince myself that she wasn’t as cute as she seemed. Was she a little too thin, maybe? And her teeth were crooked! But it didn’t work. She was cute. She had short black hair and big green eyes and thin shoulders and she held herself very erect, like a Soviet icon. And she was self-conscious about her teeth, so when she laughed at a joke, for example by Fishman, she ducked her head a little so that her teeth weren’t showing. It was an endearing gesture. She was clearly connected to Fishman somehow, but how? If Fishman was sleeping with this girl, was I obligated to tell Sarah? No, I would not tell Sarah. But Jesus! Fishman turned to her several times during dinner to say something too quietly for others to hear, and once he even put his hand on her arm. Fishman was always putting his hands on people in a conspiratorial manner. What an asshole.

“Princeton, Princeton, Princeton,” said Fishman, to a group of people who would have been willing to gnaw off their left arms if, by reducing themselves in mass, it would enable them to squeeze through that university’s heavy oak doors. I kept waiting for one of them to rebel, to throw off the shackles of Fishman: who did he think he was, talking to them like this? Instead, these sweet Russian and American grad students and post-docs lapped it up. One of them asked, of a famous Bakhtin scholar, “What’s Caryl Emerson like?”

“Oh,” said Fishman, “very collegial. I was just the other day telling her about my new project—she was very supportive. You know, she’s really very down to earth.”

He said it as if the rest of us thought that Caryl Emerson got around everywhere in a helicopter. Which, in fact, we sort of did.

His latest project, Fishman went on, was a scheme to put something or other from the Lenin Library on the internet. In fact Fishman was in town this week to negotiate with the library for digital rights, though they were being stubborn. “They said, ‘Why look at the internet when you can visit the library?’” Most people around the table laughed; Yulia, sitting next to Fishman, did not. Did she hate the internet, love libraries? I loved libraries too! “They’re still using a card catalog,” continued Fishman. “At a certain point you have to interpret this as being an act of hostility toward knowledge.” People nodded. I finished gulping down my beer and retreated to the kitchen for another.

Goddamn Fishman. This was a guy who’d once asked me what the big deal about Lotman was. “He’s just a second-rate Barthes, don’t you think?” No, I didn’t think. Fishman was an idiot.

I decided to start drinking the better beer—a Czech Budweiser, which I had never seen in a can before—and took one out of the fridge and popped it open. Yum—thick and a little sweet, just as I remembered it. I considered bringing a whole bunch with me to the table, but Simon had set up everything so nicely that I didn’t want to spoil the view with a mountain of beer cans. At the same time I didn’t want to keep sneaking off into the kitchen to fetch beers. I was wearing a blue cardigan with side pockets, pretty deep pockets actually, and I stuck one of the Budweisers into my left pocket. It protruded a little bit, but that was OK; no one was really paying attention to me anyway.

Fishman wasn’t just an idiot; he was a dangerous idiot. His parents had come from the Soviet Union, as mine had, and at around the same time. Like many of us, he’d grown up speaking Russian, and like many of us he’d inherited his parents’ ambivalence toward the country they’d escaped. Our parents had been so skeptical of Russia, so fearful of the Russians, that they had uprooted their lives, put everything in boxes, and gone to the post office dozens of times to ship their books to America, just so they could get away. But they had also remained bound to Russia by a million ties of memory and habit and affection. They watched Russian movies, shopped at Russian stores, and preferred Russian candy. My father, back in Massachusetts with his American wife and non-Russian-speaking children, now downloaded new Russian TV shows from the internet and watched them for hours as he rode his stationary bike. Whereas we, the children of these émigrés… if we were involved in Russia, we were critical of Russia and Russians, somewhat as our parents had been, but also, somehow, not. We did not maintain the same bonds; we did not experience the same attachment. I sometimes remembered Gershom Scholem’s accusation against Hannah Arendt during the furor over Eichmann in Jerusalem, a book that was deeply critical both of Israel and of the many Jews who had, according to Arendt, been too accommodating to those who wished to exterminate them. Arendt’s book was learned and acute, Scholem said. But it lacked ahavat Israel —“a love of Israel,” a love for her people. The accusation may have been unfair toward Arendt, but I think it was fair to us, to the children of the émigrés. In everything they did, even in the very ferocity of their rejection of Russia, our parents had held on to a love of Russia. Their children had not.