Keith Gessen - A Terrible Country

IHAD FINALLY found someone, and not just anyone, but Yulia, and then I had lost her. Russia had taken her. My grandmother was right.

I redoubled my efforts to advance myself for the Watson position. I wrote to my recommenders, updating them on my Russian activities so they could incorporate that into any follow-ups they felt like sending to the search committee, and I read up on old Marxist groupuscules, the better to compare October to them. If I submitted my article to one of the Russia journals soon, there might be time for it to get accepted before Watson made their decision. They had a late start, and probably wouldn’t be done before May.

My grandmother was getting better and worse simultaneously. Her strength was coming back. She shuffled around the apartment almost like before; she was eating normally. But with the return of her strength came the return of her depression—as if, having conquered most of her physical difficulties, she could go back to worrying about her spiritual ones. She began talking regularly about suicide. “You know,” she said one day after lunch, “I’ve had enough.”

I knew from the way she said it what she meant, but I decided it might be therapeutic for her to say it. “Enough of what?” I said.

“Of all this,” she said. “Of life. I’ve had my share.”

“Well,” I said. I didn’t know what to say. “You’re just going to have to tolerate it a little longer.”

“Yes,” my grandmother said. “I guess I’ll have to.”

I tried my best. One day when it wasn’t too cold out I took her to the department store across from the Clean Ponds metro. Despite going down to only three PMOOC classes, I had managed to save a little money by cutting down on hockey and boycotting the Coffee Grind, and I thought it might be nice to buy her a new pink sweater, since the one she had was frayed and had developed a noticeable hole in the right shoulder. The outing was not a success. As we shuffled toward the department store my grandmother started reminiscing about Soviet shopping. “It was impossible to find anything,” she said, “but if you did find it, you could buy it. Everything was affordable. Of course, it didn’t matter, because you couldn’t find it. Most of my clothes came from America.”

“What do you mean, from America?”

“Someone sent them to me from America.”

“My mom?” I asked. “Your daughter?”

“My daughter?”

“You had a daughter in America.”

“Yelochka?”

“Yes.”

“Yes, it must have been her. She died, you know.”

We walked on in silence. The store, aside from a hulking security guard at the entrance, was empty. People were still suffering the effects of the crisis. And this store was not cheap. It was not crazy, like the luxury stores closer to the Kremlin, but it was definitely overpriced. I knew this going in. But I had not anticipated—though I should have—the effect this would have on my grandmother. When I walked her over to the sweaters and found a pink one I thought she might like, she immediately reached for the price tag. It was 5,000 rubles—$160. “Oh, my God!” she cried, and dropped the price tag as if she’d been singed.

I found myself having an interesting reaction. I had myself been this person complaining about prices so many times, in so many stores, restaurants, coffee shops—everywhere. Especially in Russia, where some of the prices were very reasonable, in line with the salaries people made, and some of the prices were so outrageous, more in line with the massive theft at the top of the pyramid, that it was impossible not to complain. I mean, my grandmother was right. This was a thirty-dollar sweater. But my interesting reaction consisted in taking the side of the store. “That’s how much a sweater costs!” I said. “It’s a nice sweater.”

“No, thank you,” said my grandmother.

“Will you at least try it on?”

“What’s the point?”

There must be a clearance section, I thought. I should have scouted ahead and taken my grandmother there right away. Stupid.

“Hold on,” I said. “I’m going to find some cheaper sweaters. I’ll be right back.”

My grandmother had by now wandered over to the lingerie section and was picking up skimpy little underpants—they really did have very little fabric on them—and looking at the price tags and laughing in horror. “Three thousand rubles!” she called out after me, holding up a tiny blue thong.

I left her to this and started speedwalking through the store. There were overpriced winter coats from Sweden, overpriced winter hats from Norway, some jeans that were actually not so terribly priced, or anyway no more than jeans are normally overpriced, but all of them had some kind of sparkly spangles on them. Why was everything so overpriced? It wasn’t because people along the labor chain were receiving fair wages—they were not. I knew from talking with Michael the subletter, who worked in logistics, that Russia’s roads were bad, the train system was good but overcrowded, and customs duties were inordinately high. Moscow was well inland, so even under the best of circumstances it was going to be a difficult place to deliver goods to. And one of the most corrupt economic systems on Earth was far from the best of circumstances. So in the end you had a flimsy pink cotton sweater that cost five thousand rubles. I completed my tour of the store. There was no clearance section.

When I returned to the lingerie section my grandmother was no longer there. Nor was she back at the sweaters. Had something happened? I finally found her standing in front of the massive security guard.

“Tell me,” she was saying, “do a lot of people come to this store? It’s very expensive.”

The giant shrugged. How was he to know? All he knew was that if someone tried to steal something, he would fuck them up.

“Well.” My grandmother wouldn’t let up. “It doesn’t seem like there are a lot of people, does it?” She gestured to the empty store.

The giant’s countenance changed and for a second I thought I even saw him square up slightly to my tiny grandmother. Maybe she was trying to steal something, and should get fucked up? Stranger things had happened in this country.

I took my grandmother firmly by the elbow. “Shall we go?” I said.

“All right,” said my grandmother.

We walked home. For the next two weeks, whenever my grandmother called Emma Abramovna, she made sure to complain about the prices in the store. At first this hurt my feelings—I felt like she was complaining about me—but then I realized that it had given her something to talk about. She continued to wear her sweater with the hole in it. It was just a little hole. It was fine.

Emma Abramovna told us about a Tsvetaeva documentary she’d read about. Had we seen it? We hadn’t. “We never go to the movies anymore,” my grandmother lamented. “Andrei’s too busy.”

“I am not!” I said. It was true I’d been spending a lot of time with Sergei, following him around as he did his volunteer teaching, but I still had most of my evenings free, and anyway that wasn’t the reason we weren’t going to the movies. I said, “You don’t like any of the movies we see.”

“I would like this one,” said my grandmother.

“Great!” I said. “Let’s see it.”

So on a non-hockey night a few days later, we dressed warmly and headed out into the night. Once on the boulevard, my grandmother started waving at cars. Mercedes after Audi after Mercedes sped past without paying her any mind. “That car won’t pick you up,” I kept saying. My poor grandmother would ignore me, wander out into the street, and come back a few seconds later disappointed.