Keith Gessen - A Terrible Country

There were banker’s boxes in the corner and the large exercise bike jammed against the lower bunk. I had to climb past it to lie down. Now I was really looking forward to getting online so as to yell at my brother, but when I got out my laptop and tried to catch the signal from next door, it didn’t work. This may not have been Dima’s fault—my computer was old, so old that it didn’t work unless it was plugged into a socket, and there were many wireless protocols that it couldn’t recognize—and yet it was still something else he had misled me about. I considered going next door and seeing if I could adjust the router, but it seemed unbecoming of the rent collector (this was to be one of my tasks) to be stealing the tenants’ wi-fi. They were paying good money for that wi-fi.

I closed my computer and lay back on the bed, the exercise bike looming over me. My grandmother had put out an old towel and some scratchy sheets, and without getting out of bed I managed to put the sheets on. Then I lay there and thought: Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck. And then: OK. OK. Everything was fine. My grandmother was in bad shape, but I could handle it. My sheets were scratchy, but I could buy new ones. And the bedroom was a mess, but that just meant I had something on Dima. Which was good. Trust me. If you didn’t have something on Dima, it meant Dima had something on you.

It was 8:00 P.M. in Moscow, and still light out, but I felt tired, incredibly tired, and quickly, with my clothes still on, fell asleep.

IWOKE AT FIVE in the morning. My window looked onto an alleyway between our building and the Pechatnikov-side building. Since we were on the second floor and it was late August and I had the window open, and since the two stone buildings created a mini echo chamber, I found that I heard distinctly every cough, Russian swearword, door slamming, ignition turning, and radio blaring shitty Russian pop music that took place anywhere in or near the alleyway. All these noises disturbed my sleep, and not just because they were noises. Dima wouldn’t have left town in such a hurry unless he was in danger, I thought, and if Dima was in danger, then it was possible that Dima’s plenipotentiary, his brother and his rent collector, was also in danger. Though probably not. I lay in bed for a while wondering, and then sat up with a realization.

What if my grandmother wasn’t taking her medicine? Dima had been gone for over a month. What if the forgetfulness I witnessed was just a matter of her missing some pills? I went into the kitchen. Moscow is a northern city and during the summer the days start early; the sun was already up. I had seen her take some pills after our supper and put them on the shelf behind her. I retrieved them now and read the labels. One of the bottles was in fact empty. The name of the drug was unfamiliar to me, of course; there was no indication that it was for dementia, nor any indication that it wasn’t.

Dima had sent me a list of Baba Seva’s medicines, along with what they did, but thinking I’d have wi-fi in the apartment I hadn’t printed it out. Again I tried and failed to catch a wireless signal. I would need to find a place with wi-fi, and fast. I went back to my room and retrieved my threadbare towel and headed for the shower.

My grandmother’s bathroom—separate from the toilet, which had its own, much smaller room, just off the front hall—was large for a Soviet bathroom. It’s possible that it had once been part of the kitchen. Along the wall was a ledge that was used for toiletries. I put mine there now.

The first time I’d returned to Russia after we left, I was a college student. I had received a small grant to travel around and study the “post-Soviet condition.” That trip was a shock. I had never encountered such poverty. In Astrakhan, Rostov, Yalta, Odessa, Lviv, but also Moscow itself, and St. Petersburg, what you saw were ruins—ruined buildings, ruined streets, ruined people—as if the country had lost a war.

I was traveling by myself, and every night at the various cheap hostels and dormitories in which I stayed I would take out my toiletries, and every night it was such a relief. The colors were brighter and more attractive than anything I saw around me: my cool slate-gray Gillette Sensor razor (a mere three blades at the time, but a better shave than mankind had yet known); my tall blue Gillette shaving gel; my brilliant red-and-white Old Spice anti-perspirant (that stuff really worked, and no one else in Russia had it, you could tell the minute you walked onto a crowded bus); my bright yellow Gold Bond powder; my little orange Advil caplets. I was walking many miles every day, interviewing people and looking around, and in the summer heat this led to rashes in my crotch and pain in my feet, but the Gold Bond powder made them go away. And Advil! Russians were still using aspirin. The only way they knew to get rid of a bad morning hangover was to start drinking again. Whereas I popped a few smooth pills into my mouth and was as good as new. I felt like James Bond practically, with my little kit of ingenious devices. Now these wonders had arrived in Russia too, though my grandmother didn’t use them.

It was that summer trip to Russia that set me on the course I’d been on ever since. I had just finished my freshman year of college. College had come as a surprise to me, a bad one. I had thought it would basically be like high school, just cooler. Instead it was something completely different: vast, unfriendly, and highly competitive. I had dreamed of playing hockey there, but within minutes of stepping on the ice for the varsity tryout I saw that it was never going to happen—the level of play was way beyond mine. And neither did I excel in my classes. I wanted to master the Western canon, but every time I opened The Faerie Queen, I fell asleep.

Whenever I saw a Russian class in the course listings I read the description and moved on; why study at college something that I could passively imbibe at home? But halfway through my first year, after I finally quit the hockey team (I had made the JV squad, but wasn’t dressing for any games), unsure of what to do with myself and wondering if taking some classes in Russian might not be a bad way to honor my mother, I walked over to the Slavic department. It was on the fourth floor of the gray foreign languages building, and unlike every other place on that campus it was somehow homey. They had managed to Russify it. There was a big samovar in the corner, tea mugs everywhere, old Russian books in their Soviet editions like the ones we had at our house, and an ironic poster of Lenin. My parents would never have hung an ironic poster of Lenin in our house, but Dima had had one in his place in New York. I felt like I had found, for the first time at that large and forbidding institution, a place where I could be at home.

Six months later I got my grant and went to Russia for the summer. It was the first time I’d been there since we’d left. So these were the streets my parents had walked down; these were the people they had lived among. This was our old apartment (I barely remembered it), where Dima was now living. So much made sense that had not made sense until then. I visited my grandmother and Uncle Lev in Dubna; my grandmother was in her midseventies then, but she was amazingly active, translating, reading, watching movies, and taking multi-mile hikes through the woods (which contained a massive particle accelerator). I left Moscow and traveled around; people outside Moscow were more honest about their dreams, more direct about what they didn’t know, and more obviously and desperately poor. I remember sitting with a guy in Astrakhan, a large industrial fishing city on the Caspian Sea, now crumbling under the weight of global competition. This man and I met on the train down from Moscow. He was a computer programmer, like my father, but there was no work for computer programmers just then, so to make ends meet he traveled to Moscow to buy cheap clothes from Turkey to bring back and sell at an open-air market in Astrakhan. Now we were drinking beers on the rickety balcony of the tiny apartment he shared with his young wife and baby boy, and at some point he said, “Listen, Andrei, tell me. What’s it like over there?” Meaning, in America. “Is it the same as here, in the end?”