Keith Gessen - A Terrible Country

“And do what?”

“What I’m doing.”

“That’s ridiculous!” Dima typed. “Grandma is going to get worse and worse. At some point she’s going to need help taking a shower. She’s not going to want you to do that. We’re going to need a nurse and it’s going to cost money and it’s not money that I have if we don’t sell.”

But there are some things that should not be done for money, I thought. I was sitting at the windowsill. It was past midnight on a Friday—I had returned from hockey and was drinking a Zhigulovskoye with some sushki. As we were arguing over Gchat my grandmother came out of her room, in her nightgown, to go to the bathroom. Her fall and subsequent stay in the hospital had disrupted her sleeping patterns, I think, and she got up now more often in the night. She saw me and waved.

Some things must not be done for money. They must be apportioned instead along communistic principles—from each according to his ability, to each according to his need. Dima could type at me all he wanted—I was staying put.

After following Sergei around for a while, I decided that I had enough material, and I sat down and wrote it up. I placed his work in the context of quixotic Russian attempts to reorganize the world. Sergei struck me as a Tolstoy figure, the sort of person who gives up everything to wander the earth and follow the dictates of his conscience. He was wandering Moscow, not the earth, and he was not doing so barefoot but in a rickety Lada. I was not suggesting that Sergei was a saint. I was suggesting, I guess, that he was a fool—a holy fool. He was doing what all of us would have wanted to do, but were too cautious, too practical, too chickenshit to do.

I wrote the article and sent it to both Sergei and the Slavic Review . It was a long shot. I had sent more than a few articles to the Slavic Review over the years, with zero results. This one was better, but that was no reason to think it would meet with more success. The Slavic Review was far away. Whereas October, Sergei, my hockey team, my grandmother, and eventually, I still hoped, Yulia, were right here.

Not long after I sent off my article, Sergei asked somewhat formally if we could meet. My first thought was that he’d hated the article. My second thought was darker: that he and/or October were mad about Yulia. I had kissed her, and then I had made that comment about Shipalkin in front of the police station. Had I let my feelings about Yulia cloud my political judgment? I had continued seeing Yulia at the Marxist seminars and she seemed to have stopped being mad at me, but neither did she seem like she particularly wanted to talk. And Shipalkin, her husband, was still in Lefortovo.

Sergei and I agreed to meet at a Mu-Mu café about a mile from my place. If he was mad about the article, I could deal with that. Another alternative was that, now that I’d filed the article, I no longer had an excuse to be hanging around, and so therefore had to leave. But I didn’t want to leave. I liked what I was doing. Even without Yulia, I had become very attached to the entire October group.

I played all the bad scenarios out in my mind as I made my way to Mu-Mu. Mu-Mu, as in the sound a cow makes, was in a basement and was cafeteria style and very cheap and pretty good. If it had been a little closer to our house I’d have been able to take my grandmother there whenever we needed food. I found Sergei sitting there in front of a bowl of borscht. I got my own bowl of borscht and sat down with him. Sergei got right to it.

“Listen,” he said. “I don’t know w-w-what your plans are or feelings are, but now that you’re done with your article, I wanted to ask you about something.”

I nodded.

“We—October—are going to start a website soon. We want to have a space to discuss leftist politics, educational theory, cultural events, that sort of thing. We think it’s important for the left to have that kind of platform.”

“That sounds good.” This seemed to me a rather roundabout way of kicking me out of the group.

“And we think that a certain amount of it—not all of it, definitely, but the good stuff—would be worth translating into English, as a way of building solidarity internationally. One of the troubles with the Russian left the past few decades has been its isolation from the West. We need to end that.”

I agreed again.

“So a few of us were talking, and I know you were involved largely for research purposes, but we’d really like it if you were the one who translated the texts. You understand what we’re doing. And your English is good.”

“Ah!” I said. I was immensely relieved. “I’d love to do that.”

“We can’t pay you, of course.”

“No, I wouldn’t want you to.” This was mostly true. However little money I had, these guys had less.

“OK. Well, great.” Sergei bent down and spooned some borscht into his mouth. “There’s one more thing. Would you be willing to join October? It would make working together easier and I think more pleasant.”

This was unexpected.

“I would consider it an honor,” I said. “What do I have to do?”

“Well.” Sergei seemed mildly embarrassed. “There’s an oath. A few years ago when we were starting we had a long argument about it, but we decided it was the right thing: it would spell out the responsibilities of the party to you, and of you to the party.”

“OK,” I said. “What is it?”

It was a short oath. “I pledge to do what is best for the party in accordance with my conscience, and to try to live honestly and directly in a way that will bring credit to the party. The party in turn pledges to help me, to advise me, and to support me should I need support.” Sergei stopped. “That’s it.”

We did it right then and there in the Mu-Mu café. I was now a member of October. In the next few weeks, I started getting the first of the texts to translate into English. And I continued attending the reading group. My entry into October meant that people confided in me more. Misha told me about his drinking problem, Boris about the fact that his mother wanted him to move out and get married. Sergei had always been honest with me, but now as his marriage moved into its death agony I felt almost like his only confidant. His wife had said that she couldn’t live like this any longer; he had told her that he couldn’t live any other way; they were at an impasse. Sergei felt like there was no way to fix it but he worried, as his wife did also, about their daughter. “It’s normal for people to change,” he said. “We got married while we were still in college. Of course we changed. But it’s impossible for a child to understand. If only there were some way to tell them, from the start, that mama and papa isn’t forever. That each of us will still be here but not necessarily together. There must be some way, because otherwise it’s a lie.” He was in a bind of his own creation, but that didn’t make it less painful, it seemed to me.

Yulia continued to be guarded with me, and that was understandable: her husband was in jail and she spent a lot of time thinking about him, standing in line to visit him, talking with lawyers about his case. Yes, we had kissed, but that was long ago. I would find someone else to kiss, probably. Howard, amazingly, after months of sleeping with girls from the online hooker website, had met a nice girl who worked at Russian Esquire and was dating her. He had suggested to me that she might have friends who were single. And Oleg, in the locker room, had suggested the same thing. “Andrei,” he asked me one day, “do you have a girl?”

“No,” I said.

“My girl has a friend who might be interested,” Oleg said. The word he used for his “girl” was actually telka, a calf—it was in this context a word for “mistress.” And so it was that a few days later I found myself sitting at a gaudy, expensive café off Clean Ponds with Oleg, Oleg’s calf, and Oleg’s calf’s friend, named Polina. Oleg’s calf was a quiet, mousy girl who kept fiddling with her phone, but Polina was a tall, healthy, attractive twenty-five-year-old. They worked at a beauty salon together. A few months earlier I would have jumped at the chance, but now I couldn’t find any enthusiasm inside myself. When Oleg suggested we all go to a club together to continue the evening, I said I had to get back and check on my grandmother. “All right,” said Oleg, and didn’t hold it against me.