Keith Gessen - A Terrible Country

One evening a few nights hence, as my grandmother was whipping me at anagrams, I got a text. It was from Yulia.

“Are you able to come out?” it said.

It was eight o’clock on a Friday. I had hockey but I could skip it. Presumably Yulia wanted to tell me what Sergei had failed to—that she wanted me out of the reading group. Maybe I could talk her out of it. I texted back that I would be happy to come out, and even, as a show of courage, added a smiley face—Russians did so by just using a bunch of parentheses, like this: ))) It was an odd way to make a face, since there were no eyes, but on the other hand you could use as many parentheses as you wanted, to indicate a supersmile. I used four parentheses. But as I made my way to the Czech beer place near her house I felt like a man on his way to an execution.

She was there already when I showed up, looking pale and beautiful and nervous and already drinking a glass of wine.

“ Privet, ” I said.

“ Privet, ” she said. She seemed upset. I didn’t say anything. She asked politely after my grandmother and then she said, “You were right about Petya.” Petya was Shipalkin. She looked miserable as she said it.

“I was?”

“He’s been released,” said Yulia.

“That’s good!” I said, partly meaning it.

Yulia didn’t seem to have heard me. “He gave everyone up,” she said.

“What?”

“He ratted them out. Told on them.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I do. His lawyer said he was looking at five years, that there was no hope unless he cooperated with the investigation and named the other members of Mayhem.”

“Don’t the police know the other members of Mayhem already?”

“They seem not to have. I don’t know. But Petya was released two days ago and yesterday they picked up two of the guys and another of them took a train to Kiev.”

“Wow,” I said. It sounded like he really had given them up. Why was Yulia telling me this?

“Well,” I said, not knowing what else to say, “what’s he doing now?”

“I don’t know,” said Yulia, “and I don’t care.”

She took a sip of her wine.

“Will you do me a favor, Andrei?”

I nodded.

“Will you get drunk with me?”

So we got drunk. As we did so I tried not to think too much about what I was doing. Was Yulia vulnerable right now, due to her ex-husband’s shameful behavior? And was I, by sticking around while she was in this vulnerable state, taking advantage of that? And did this also mean—I couldn’t help but think—that once she was no longer in this state, she would lose interest again? Yulia was wearing tight white jeans and a small black cotton sweater that hugged her torso. She was a thin girl, and very pale. Her big green eyes in such a face gave her a particularly pained look. Russian girls, even intellectual Marxist Russian girls, starved themselves. And yet in Yulia’s case it didn’t matter. I liked it. Not her starving, of course. But how she looked.

She was drunk after three glasses of wine, whereas I, after the same number of beers, was merely a little giddy. I walked her to her house, a twelve-story block not far from Patriarch Ponds, and on the doorstep we stopped. “Good night, Andrei,” she said, and hugged me. I would have preferred that she kiss me but she also seemed so upset, so unhappy, that I mostly just wanted her to be less so. We said good-bye, and she went inside.

After that, we began to text each other, and go to the movies. This was innocent enough, in the sense that we weren’t necessarily going to the movies romantically. I didn’t want to hurry her. I did, however, want to impress her, and at first, as with my grandmother, I tried to do so by finding artsy films. Then she confessed that she actually didn’t mind seeing something less high-minded, so with some relief we did that. We watched the Russian version of Titanic , called Admiral , about the White admiral Kolchak, who fought the Bolsheviks, and a kind of Russian Flashdance, called Stilyagi, “The Stylish Ones,” about a group of 1950s rebels in Moscow who adopted colorful clothing and jazz music as a form of protest against the stifling sartorial conformity of Stalinism. That was the movie Yulia and I saw the night she invited me up to her apartment.

That night, Moscow changed for me forever. It went from being the terrible place where I was born to being—something else. I wanted to be at home when my grandmother woke up, so in the middle of the night I whispered a good night to Yulia and went downstairs. It was three o’clock in the morning and mid-March in Moscow, and it was still pretty cold. The subway was closed and if I didn’t want to walk I would have to take a cab; but I did not feel like sharing my feelings, my joy and sense of belonging, with anyone, and so I walked. It was about a mile and a half to our place, and cold and quiet, and walking down the side streets approaching the great big, awful highway that is the Garden Ring, I felt the terrible freedom of this place. It was a fortress set down in a hostile environment. On one side the Mongols; on the other the Germans, Balts, and Vikings. So the Russians built this fortress here on a bend in the Yauza River, and hoped for the best. They built it big because they were scared. It was a gigantic country, and even now, in the twenty-first century, barely governed. You could do anything, really. And amid this freedom, this anarchy, people met and fell in love and tried to comfort one another.

On our last few dates, but also, especially, when we were lying in bed together, I’d learned about Yulia’s family. She had grown up in Kiev, an only child, as most children of that generation were only children, because everyone was so poor; her parents were both engineers. When the country started falling apart, they saw the writing on the wall and decided that, since Yulia’s father was Jewish, they would emigrate to Israel. Yulia was eleven when her father left to scout it out and find work while Yulia’s mother sold off their things and prepared for the move. At first he was in touch often, relating the difficulty of adjusting to immigrant life, complaining about the other immigrants, worrying that he would not find work; but soon he seemed to get very busy, and was in touch less often. Yulia’s mother nonetheless continued to sell off their things, because they weren’t going to take, for example, their television with them to Israel, nor their sofa, and it was a few days after they sold their television that Yulia’s mother heard, from a mutual acquaintance, that her husband had been seen with another woman on the streets of Haifa. Over the phone Yulia’s mother confronted her husband, who confessed, but said he still wanted them to come over, that they were still married and he would take care of all the arrangements, and then, when it was settled, they could peacefully divorce. Yulia’s mother screamed—Yulia was in her room, quietly reading—and hung up, and though Yulia’s father continued to try to send money, through various acquaintances who were traveling back and forth, Yulia’s mother refused it. As a result, little Yulia grew up very poor, albeit in a place where everyone else was poor, without a television or a sofa to help pass the time.

Her mother never recovered. She managed to get her job back but it was at a research institute and not much of a job. She put all her energy into Yulia, forming what sounded like a sometimes toxic, sometimes wonderful, always deeply intense relationship. In the dispute with her father, Yulia had taken her mother’s side entirely. Eventually she had gone to college in Kiev and studied literary theory; in one of her classes she met Shipalkin, and soon, like most people they knew, they were married. Then Shipalkin got a job doing graphic design in Moscow, and Yulia applied and was accepted to grad school. They moved. Just before they left Kiev, her aunt, her mother’s sister and best friend, died in a car accident. Yulia had always felt guilty about leaving, and thought frequently of moving back.