Keith Gessen - A Terrible Country

“How did you know?” she’d say.

“Because it’s a Mercedes.”

Then I saw an old Zhiguli lumbering toward us. “Whereas that car,” I now said, and stuck out my hand, “will pick us up.” And sure enough the old wreck pulled over and the driver asked where we were going. My grandmother looked at me like I had magical powers of foresight. Then we sat in traffic for twenty minutes. The boulevard wasn’t really built for cars, and yet cars had no choice but to use it. It would have been faster to walk to the theater, though this way at least we were sitting down. My grandmother, sitting up front, spent most of the ride talking about how old she was and how all of her friends had died. The driver nodded politely and occasionally made a sympathetic sound. When we finally arrived my grandmother handed him fifty rubles, which was too little. Luckily I had anticipated this possibility, and was able to hand him fifty more.

We came into the theater after the lights had gone down; my grandmother clung to me as we maneuvered ourselves to a pair of seats in the front row. This way she could stretch out her legs. And finally we were there. The movie unspooled before us: it showed Tsvetaeva’s life before the Revolution, a happy life among the Moscow intelligentsia, her father the professor and founder of the art collection that became the Pushkin Museum. The Tsvetaevs lived in comfort, they had servants, but they were not aristocrats or parasites; they were the very best of the world that the Revolution would destroy. The documentary had good archival footage. A lot of it took place near where we were sitting—Tsvetaeva grew up around the corner, practically, at Three Pond Lane.

“Andryush,” my grandmother said very loudly, turning to me. “Did we get tickets?”

“Yes.”

“Are you sure?”

I assured her we had tickets.

“Excuse me!” someone said, meaning, please be quiet.

Tsvetaeva had her first success with her poetry at a young age and embarked on her first love affairs, with her eventual husband, Sergei Efron, and also the poetess Sophia Parnok. Then the Bolsheviks came to power. Tsvetaeva was soon cut off from Efron, who was fighting the Bolsheviks in Crimea, while she remained in Moscow with their two young daughters.

“Andryush,” my grandmother said, “I need to use the bathroom.”

I took her hand and led her out of the hall. Once we were close enough I let her go. She looked awkward, in a hurry, as she went into the ladies’ room. I waited for her in the cinema’s empty, tastelessly furnished café. She took a while, and then emerged, my poor grandmother, looking very tired.

We had missed the Civil War, the terrible death of Tsvetaeva’s daughter from hunger, and then her emigration, finally, to Prague, to join her husband, who had escaped there from the Bolsheviks.

Tsvetaeva lived happily in Prague and gave birth to a son; then she lived unhappily in Paris, wrote some of the greatest Russian poetry of the twentieth century, and tried to make ends meet. All through this her husband did nothing. Or, not nothing: He went to school. He went to school a lot. In Prague, at the age of thirty, Efron enrolled in university and started a student literary magazine. A few years later, once they’d moved to Paris, Efron again enrolled in university, this time to study filmmaking. I started to feel like the movie was some kind of criticism of me.

It was only in 1934, at the age of forty-two, that Sergei Efron finally got a job—and that job was for the NKVD. At first all he had to do was praise the USSR to the deeply anti-Soviet émigré community in Paris, which Efron, who’d recently been converted to Soviet Communism, could manage with a clear conscience. But eventually the job came to include political assassinations. This is what happens when you work for the NKVD. Efron helped organize the killings of the defected Soviet agent Nathan Poretsky and (possibly) Leon Trotsky’s son Lev Sedov. Efron did a so-so job, and with the police on his trail, fled for Moscow. He was soon followed there by the couple’s daughter, Ariadna, who worshipped him.

Here my grandmother had to go to the bathroom again. I hung out in the doorway of the theater until she came back, watching the movie and watching for her.

Tsvetaeva was now alone in Paris with her teenage son, Mur, impoverished, surrounded by a hostile émigre community that believed she had been in league with her husband and, by extension, the NKVD. She knew well enough what was happening in Stalin’s Russia, though no one who wasn’t there could really imagine how bad it was. She had had a fateful meeting with Pasternak in Paris in 1935. In coded language—he was too scared to speak freely—he tried to warn her. But she did not understand. All she knew was that her family had abandoned her; her friends refused to speak with her. Nazi Germany rose in the east, and France was preparing, albeit too slowly, for war. Should she return to the USSR? A few years earlier she had written one of her greatest poems. “Homesickness,” it began, “what bullshit!” She wouldn’t return out of some misplaced sentiment about her so-called motherland. But her husband and her daughter were there.

After a terrible period of indecision, Tsvetaeva took the train to Moscow in 1938. She found a frightened country. Her old friends avoided her; even her half sister declined to see her. (Her full sister, Anastasia Tsvetaeva, was already in the Gulag.) Efron and Ariadna were in an NKVD safe house outside Moscow, where Tsvetaeva and Mur joined them. Within six months, Efron and Ariadna were both arrested, and Tsvetaeva and her son were forced out of the house. They sought lodging with the remnants of their old family in Moscow. Meanwhile Mur, a spoiled teenager with limited Russian, had trouble adjusting to Soviet life. He made an already bad situation worse. Soon they joined the mass evacuation before the German advance, and life became even harder and more lonely. Eventually it became too much. Two years after they arrived, Tsvetaeva hanged herself. Efron, her overeducated husband, was shot by the NKVD that year. Her son, just barely out of his teens, was killed at the front a few years later, in 1944. Only their daughter, Ariadna, who spent years in the Gulag, survived.

My grandmother had come back from the bathroom now and we walked again into the theater. How much of this stuff had she been through? Some of it, for sure. She too was in Moscow when the Germans invaded, and she too was evacuated to the Soviet interior. Her father was ill and she was already pregnant with my mother, but when Stalin asked, people went, and in any case the Germans were coming. She too lost her husband during those years. But she was thirty years younger than Tsvetaeva. Her difficulties were less difficult. She survived.

The film ended and the lights came up. It had been, to my surprise, admirably understated, scrupulously documented, intelligent, humane.

My grandmother turned to me as we walked out and said, with a slightly sour expression on her face, “What did you think of it?”

“I thought it was great!” I whispered.

“I didn’t. I thought it was boring and pointless.”

“What?” I said, much louder than I expected to. “How can you say that?”

My grandmother pursed her lips and shook her head. I recognized the gesture because I had inherited it somehow, presumably via my mother, and used it when I was forced, almost against my will (said the gesture), to point out that some much-praised movie or TV show or book was in fact garbage. “I don’t know,” said my grandmother. “I just didn’t get it.”

She was being a snob about this movie that had described this life with such care, that had resurrected and paid homage to the sufferings of an entire generation—sufferings that she herself, my grandmother, had shared! I was inexplicably miffed. They weren’t my sufferings. The extent of my suffering had been a mildly embarrassing car ride and having to leave the movie theater a couple of times so my grandmother could use the bathroom. (Was it something we ate?) And yet she was the one who wanted to see it!