Keith Gessen - A Terrible Country

What an asshole, I thought as I walked the six long blocks to Sergei’s. Because if people were supposed to get everywhere in their cars, why would they spend a lot of time tending to the gardens in between their buildings? The answer was, they wouldn’t. As with the big public housing projects built in the United States, the grounds between the big apartment blocks had not automatically filled themselves with park space and trees and children playing. Maybe in the Soviet era it was different, but now they were filled with trash, cars that people had nowhere else to park, more trash, and construction projects. I must have passed at least half a dozen construction-like holes in the ground on my way to Sergei’s, though what exactly was being dug I had no idea, and in any case it was already dark. Dogs were barking. The street I walked along was so desolate that I worried there wouldn’t even be a store for me to buy beer at, but finally when I reached Sergei’s place I saw one in the basement of his building. I bought a bunch of beers and then rang upstairs. Someone buzzed me in. I pulled on the heavy metal door and entered a cramped, poorly lit foyer; it was the same exact design as my grandmother’s old building in Dubna, with a little screened-in booth for the building “superintendent,” who usually sat inside watching television—in fact, he was doing so now—and scowled at people who came in. This wasn’t exactly a doorman whose visitor book you had to sign, but it wasn’t not a doorman, either; I made the mistake of saying hello, to which the man, who looked to be in his late sixties, asked without acknowledging the greeting, “Who’re you here to see?”

“Sergei Ivanov,” I said.

The man grunted. “You having some kind of party up there or what?”

“Just a little one,” I said, smiling.

He didn’t answer, and I kept going. I walked past the mailboxes, which were in the same spot as in my grandmother’s Dubna building and in the same condition—smashed, half open, covered in graffiti—then up three short steps and to the elevator. It smelled like piss. I held my breath and pressed the number 9.

As soon as I reached his floor, things got better. I heard music coming from his apartment, and it was Yulia who opened the door. “Andrei!” she said, in a way I had never heard her say it. She was wearing a white cotton dress with flowers on it, and beaming, and when I stepped in she gave me a kiss on the cheek. She was drunk. She told me to throw my coat on the bed and then danced off into the living room. Still processing this, I went into the kitchen to drop off my beers and take one for myself. There I found Misha and Nikolai and a few people I didn’t know sitting at the kitchen table and drinking. Misha was telling a story about growing up in a neighborhood on the outskirts of Moscow before inheriting his grandmother’s apartment. As little Misha navigated the area in the early nineties, gangs of kids would approach him. “Grunge or metal?” they’d say, meaning, which do you prefer? The right answer could be either, and if you gave the wrong answer you’d get beaten up. “Though usually the right answer was metal,” said Misha. “They’d say, ‘Oh, yeah? Which groups do you like?’ But you could bluff, because they didn’t have any more access to it than you did. I’d say ‘Deep Purple.’ And they’d be like, ‘OK, Deep Purple, cool,’ and let me go.”

“In my neighborhood it was ‘Rap or metal,’” said Nikolai. “And the answer was always definitely metal, because otherwise it meant you liked black people. That made it easier. Though I’d still sometimes get beaten up.”

I liked these guys so much. It was like they’d lived some heightened version of my own life, where Western popular culture filtered in slowly, at first merely in the form of rumors about rap and metal, but gradually nudging out the older Russian literary culture that our parents had passed on to us. For me, in order to fit in, learning American pop culture was merely a matter of catching up. For them it was a kind of decision that they lived with, and had to remake, almost every day. To be Russian was in some way constantly to have to choose, not between rap and metal per se, but between the Russian and the Western—in what you ate, what you listened to, what you thought. And Misha, Yulia, Sergei, Boris, my friends, had settled on an appealing hybrid: no one I met in Russia had studied Western culture as deeply as they had and extracted so much that was so good in it, while staying true, as best they could, to the place where they were from. In their politics it was the same. Marx was a German philosopher who had fled his native land for Paris and then London. But he had had his greatest success, his most devoted students, in the Russians. And here he had them still.

I stood in the kitchen and looked out the window. We were close to the edge of the city; an apartment like this, as far from the center and then as far from the metro as this was, went for pretty cheap, and yet what a view it had. From Sergei’s kitchen you could see a highway, a train track, an elevated subway track, an elevated highway, and another train track. In the dark the cars and trains raced by in both directions; it was, on the one hand, a vision of modernity, the future, but on the other hand it looked shabby and improvised, clearly the result of not doing things right the first time. You had the distinct impression that one of the cars or trains was about to fall off and collide with something. In between these rail lines of the future were tall buildings like the one I was in; they looked like bookshelves left behind on a street corner, tottering.

I took my beer and walked down the corridor to the living room, where dance music was playing and about ten people were somewhat awkwardly dancing. I was still pondering the kiss on the cheek from Yulia; as I stepped into the living room and my eyes adjusted to the relative lack of light, I couldn’t find her. Momentarily I feared that she was here with Shipalkin, that this accounted for her happy mood, and that they were somewhere together right now. Then someone grabbed my sleeve and pulled me toward her: Yulia. I even thought I saw a mild look of impatience in her eyes. We danced. I am a terrible dancer, but so was Yulia, so it was OK. At one point during “Stayin’ Alive,” Yulia did a pretty credible disco dance, and I copied her. Then she pulled me close to her and straightened up and kissed me on the lips. It was only a momentary kiss, but it was on purpose, and after she released me she looked at me in a way that seemed to say that she was not blind to the fact that I’d been following her around with my eyes for the past two months. We kept dancing, and we kissed some more, and more intently, and then it was late, and she, Boris, Misha, and I shared a car back to the center, since by then the metro was closed. Boris and Yulia and I huddled in the backseat, and for the entirety of the ride Yulia had her head on my shoulder and was asleep. We dropped her off first, then the guys, and me last. I had the driver drop me at the corner of Sretenka and the Garden Ring, so that I could buy a pastry from the Azeri chicken guys. I walked the few remaining blocks home in the cold, eating it. I wasn’t sure exactly what had happened back there between Yulia and me, and whether she would care to continue it the next day and the day after, but I didn’t care. All of Sretenka was lit up on this night, and all of it seemed to smile on me.

The next day, my grandmother fell down the stairs.

AFEW WEEKS EARLIER I’d finally gotten wi-fi in the apartment. The new semester was in full swing and I was sitting at the kitchen table one evening, answering emails offline from students who thought Tolstoy was making too big a deal out of Anna Karenina’s divorce, when my grandmother came in and asked if I wanted to have some tea and pancakes. I continued working as she made them—was it the end of the world to choose love over your children? Yes, my friends. It was the end of the world, or a world—and when she was done, I lazily put my computer on the windowsill alcove instead of taking it back into my room. As I did so a message popped up from the wireless icon that I had a signal. I didn’t get too excited—when first trying to get internet in the apartment, I’d seen many promising signals—but when as an experiment I opened my browser and typed in the New York Times web address, there was the Gray Lady, telling me the news. I had internet! When I left the windowsill, I lost the signal. But as long as I kept my computer there, pulling up a chair backward and sitting astride it, I was in. I was on the internet.