Keith Gessen - A Terrible Country

“You know what?” I said. “If you didn’t like this movie, then we won’t go to movies anymore! I don’t see the point.”

She heard me. She stopped and turned to me. “Andryushik,” she said gently, “don’t get mad. I really didn’t understand what it was about. What was it about?”

I had a thunderous look on my face, I could feel it, and then I felt it melt away. My poor grandmother. She couldn’t hear; even in a movie theater, with the giant speakers, it must have been difficult to understand everything that was happening. And her memory was terrible—how could she follow the narrative if she couldn’t remember anything from one minute to the next? Of course she didn’t enjoy the movie.

“It was about Tsvetaeva,” I said.

“Tsvetaeva?” she said. “That’s a wonderful poet.”

“Yes. The film was about her life.”

“She hanged herself,” said my grandmother. Then she added, “During the war.”

My grandmother still remembered reams of Russian poetry, and she recited some now:

“Yes…” my grandmother said. “Survivor of that time, that place.”

I was confused. “Is that Tsvetaeva?” I asked.

“No. Akhmatova.”

She let me hail the car this time. It was almost ten o’clock, the streets had emptied a little, and we encountered no traffic on our way back home.

THE THING ABOUT ME as a hockey player was that I wasn’t very good. I wasn’t bad, I was competent, but compared to my love of hockey, my skill was minuscule. In that gap lay all my disappointment. I was an OK player. But I wanted to be so much better.

Still, I did what I could. In hockey there are two types of players—skill players and grinders. I was a grinder. My shot had never been very good, even in high school, and playing with Anton’s crappy stick didn’t make it any better; I had no moves that would allow me to buy space and time for myself in tight spots. I was pretty good at anticipating where the play would be and getting there, though I was bad at stickhandling with my head up, which would have allowed me to see and anticipate much more. I scored some goals that year, but the plays I remember were ones where I made a nice outlet pass to Anton or Oleg; or the time I managed to knock Grisha on his back with an open-ice check at our blue line, sending our bench into a spontaneous cheer; or the time I actually caught up to Alyosha from the white team as he maneuvered the puck toward our goal.

But I was not a professional hockey player, nor would I ever be. As the rest of my life became busier, I had to cut down the hockey to a minimum. I still played against the white team on Wednesdays and Fridays, but I stopped going out to the hellscape rink next to the elevated gas line, and also the game with the locker room sheds in the parking lot.

I decided to focus my article on Sergei’s departure from the university and his activities, in particular his teaching activities, since then. He had invented what he called mobile classrooms, though the mobile part of it was actually Sergei driving his old Lada. He had spent a few months putting up flyers around Moscow advertising a university-trained teacher to lead literature seminars for free. It took a while, he said, but eventually he had a steady set of about six or seven groups he met with on a weekly basis.

The students in the classes were primarily, to my surprise, men, without much education, who wanted to talk about their experience of a world that was changing all around them. Sergei facilitated this, inserting the teachings of the literature they were reading where necessary, and at other times simply letting the men talk. He also taught high school students whose parents couldn’t afford tutors to prepare them for university entry exams, and he taught what essentially amounted to Russian language classes to workers from Central Asia. He would typically try to teach two or three classes in a day, organizing them in such a way that he didn’t have to travel too far in between. But Moscow was a big city and he did a lot of driving. I followed him for a week and by the end of those days I was so tired I could barely sleep. But Sergei seemed not to notice the exertion. He wasn’t paid by any of the people, although more often than not there was food at the meetings, and during the evenings a beer, and at one of the classes I attended, in the dormitory of some workers from Tajikistan, the men gave him a traditional Tajik tambourine as a sign of their gratitude—at that point he had been teaching their class for exactly one year.

It wasn’t all some kind of montage from an inspirational film about radical education. Half the classes I came to were ill attended—two or three people. At one meeting, four middle-aged men with big guts who’d decided to embark on a program of self-improvement demanded to know why Sergei had assigned them Tsvetaeva, whom the men merrily referred to as a slut even after Sergei had explained why they shouldn’t. But perhaps the worst incident I saw was the mother of a boy Sergei was helping prepare for his exams—for free, alongside another boy—badgering Sergei about the theoretical nature of the small class’s discussions. Couldn’t he just tell them what sort of questions were going to be asked by the examiners? Sergei tried to answer that the boys needed to learn how to think about literature, but the mother wasn’t mollified. She relented only after he suggested that learning how to think about literature in a theoretical mode would actually allow her son to answer questions about books he hadn’t even read. “So he doesn’t have to read all these books?” she asked.

“N-n-n-n-no, he does,” said Sergei. “But there might be books on the exam that we don’t have.” The mother, a thin woman with big blue eyes who appeared to live alone in this neat but ancient one-room apartment with her teenage son, nodded suspiciously and retreated into the kitchen.

Still, it was incredible—not just because it was exhausting, discouraging, mentally draining, and even possibly dangerous, but because he wasn’t being paid. His wife worked as an editor at Lenta.ru, a large media company, and earned a small but sufficient living, and the only money Sergei contributed was from playing goalie in the various men’s leagues—he got twenty dollars every time he came out, which was about three times a week. In a sense it was not so much the actual teaching that so impressed me, though that too, but the willingness to live off his wife. Sergei admitted that it was a source of tension within the family. “It’s like she married one person, and now she’s living with another person,” he said of his wife. “And she thinks this new person cares more about his political beliefs than about her and her daughter.”

“Is that true?”

“No. Maybe. I don’t know. I want my daughter to live in a fair country. But my wife wants me to get a job.”

He felt bad about it, but he wasn’t going to change. From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. It had the force—or should have had the force—of a biblical injunction. And that’s how Sergei lived.

We were getting into March now, and I was hearing more and more from Dima. “You’re definitely leaving at the end of the summer, right?” he said one day over Gchat.

“I don’t know,” I said. I had recently learned that my old nemesis Fishman was also applying for the Watson job—it was a mediocre college, it was isolated, the closest cultural attraction was a giant federal penitentiary, but the job market was tight and at least at Watson they wouldn’t make you teach German. Then my adviser told me, to my amazement and chagrin, that Watson had brought in Richard Sutherland, from Princeton, the man who had asked me to fetch him seltzer water at the airport, to head up the search committee. (“They wanted someone who didn’t know anything to help mislead the other people who don’t know anything” was how my adviser put it; we both knew that this meant Fishman now had an inside track for the job.) But now, talking to Dima, I tried to put on a brave face. “I’m applying for a job for the fall,” I told him, “and I hope I get it. But if I don’t, I think I’ll stay here.”