Keith Gessen - A Terrible Country

Transplanted to Moscow, the marriage began to falter. They had met when they were both awkward young people adjusting to university life; now Shipalkin was discovering that he had other possibilities. “There were so many pretty girls, and he was no longer a boy who didn’t know how to button his shirt correctly,” Yulia said. “It turned his head.” He started coming home later from work, and eventually admitted he was sleeping with one of the other designers at his office. Yulia kicked him out; she stayed in the apartment, or rather their room in the apartment, with two roommates, though she soon found that she couldn’t afford the room on her own and invited a friend of hers from Kiev to share the room with her. Her friend Katya worked the night shift at a TV production company and so, for the most part, Yulia had the room to herself at night and Katya had it during the day. It had been confusing and complicated at first but now Yulia was used to it. And she was used to Moscow, she said, or at least was beginning to get used to it.

“It was very hard for my mother when I left,” Yulia said, “and I thought that after Shipalkin and I separated, I could go back. But there is no work in Kiev. The place is being robbed blind. Here at least I can make a little money and send some of it home.” She tutored kids for the entrance exams and even ghostwrote PhD dissertations for government officials—exactly the sort of thing Sergei quit academia over. She went home to visit—it was a night’s train ride—about once a month.

Everything here was twice as hard as in New York, I thought, as I made my way home that first night from Yulia’s place in the cold. It was harder to get around, it was harder to find a sweater, it was harder to get a seat on the subway, it was harder to find somewhere to eat or somewhere to live—grad students had trouble making ends meet in New York too, but I’d never heard of two people who weren’t romantically involved sharing the same bed. And this place was more unjust, it was far more unjust. Just the other day in Sad, where I’d had my date with Sonya from the internet, a man had shot a woman when she’d demanded an apology from him for spilling his drink on her. “You’re a fat cow,” he said. Then he shot her in the leg. He worked, like half the country, apparently, at RussOil, and would probably get away with it.

It was Shipalkin who had gotten the couple involved with Sergei and October, but it was Yulia who became committed to it. She was very taken with Sergei’s critique of privatized higher education, and though she did not consider herself a very outgoing person, she did have a knack for spotting malcontents. She had met Boris at a public lecture in which he asked an aggressive question, and she had met Misha during his university protest campaign. “And you, of course.”

“Me?”

“Remember I wrote you after that dinner?”

“Of course! But I’ve never understood why.”

“Well, I got the impression that you were unhappy with the U.S. educational system, and also that you didn’t like Fishman,” she said. “I found this an appealing combination. You seemed a little confused, but willing to stand up for your beliefs.”

I wondered if that was true. I hoped that it was. As I reached Tsvetnoi Boulevard, near our place, I saw a Kroshka Kartoshka. It was a freestanding little plastic building, the size of a Chinese takeout place, with a big white counter and a few tables and chairs; they’d plunked it down in the middle of the boulevard, a little hut on city property, no doubt because some bureaucrat had been paid a bribe. “Kroshka Kartoshka” meant “little potato,” and that is what they served: baked potatoes. They’d split the top open and you could choose a filling—mushrooms, or chicken salad, or cheese, or some combination. This is what Russians had been doing with potatoes for generations. It was, maybe, a little gross, and to see it here in this hut in the middle of Tsvetnoi Boulevard—it was a little unseemly, something shameful made public. But it was our shared, national shame. “We like to bake potatoes and put gross stuff in them to make them taste better”—this is what the Kroshka Kartoshka stand said. There was a chain of them across the city, in these little huts, and I went in. I ordered a potato with bacon and onion inside, paid fifty cents for it, and then ate it contemplatively at one of the little plastic tables, without taking off my coat. Then I finally went home. It was four in the morning now. My grandmother would be getting up soon. But I was able to sleep until ten, and my grandmother didn’t mind.

YULIA AND I began going out. During the day, she was usually at the university and I was reading student blog posts about Uncle Vanya and hanging around with my grandmother until she went to bed, but after that, Moscow was ours. It was a city that stayed up late. The subway closed early but all the bars and cafés and movie theaters remained open, and after eleven o’clock I could get to Yulia’s place in about ten minutes, if I paid a hundred rubles for a car that would take me down Rozhdestvenskiy Boulevard. Afterward I could get home in the same amount of time, for the same price, though on the way back I tended to take the Garden Ring. The cabs really sped like crazy down the Garden Ring at night.

What did we do together? It was, for the most part, normal stuff. Her roommate Katya’s schedule changed shortly after Yulia and I started going out, so she was around more, and this meant that spending time at Yulia’s place was not entirely appealing. So we kept going to the movies; we even went to some cafés. Experiencing Moscow with Yulia was something completely new to me. I wasn’t transported out of the city; in fact some of its latent violence, the way aggressive men dominated public spaces, became clearer to me when walking around with her. And in all other ways too it was the same unsmiling, expensive place. But I saw how Yulia handled it. She was exceedingly polite, even formal, with people she did not know. (I recognized in this my grandmother’s politeness and formality, which she kept up even with many people she did know, because she forgot that she knew them.) She was a master of withholding her approval; outside a tight circle of friends, she kept up a defensive shield. But inside that circle, and inside the city that the circle had created within the larger city, was a whole other world. The Octobrists had carved a little path through Moscow that allowed them to enjoy it. None of them made much money, or even any. They couldn’t be full citizens of the consumer paradise that Moscow had become. But there were little cafés and bookstores and bookstore-cafés where you could sit and have tea or a beer for a couple of dollars and read Derrida for a few hours without anyone bothering you. Even critical theory, which had fallen out of fashion back in the United States, was still cool here. It was the Moscow I had once hoped existed but couldn’t find. Now here it was.

For Yulia, I soon learned, the world was divided into two kinds of people: her people and other people; good and evil. Men were, for the most part, evil. Women were allies in the fight against men or they were traitors. Some were traitors out of weakness, others out of treachery. And theoretically, some men were allies also. Boris, barely masculine, sexually neutered, was OK; so was weird, pathetic Nikolai, with his quixotic dacha that no one wanted to help him build. Misha and Sergei were treated with suspicion: Misha because of his drinking and not very good treatment of Yulia’s roommate Masha, Sergei for more complicated reasons. “He’s been stringing his poor wife along for almost as long as I’ve known him,” Yulia said. “He can’t stand the thought of breaking up his own family. But he’s chosen his path and he needs to stay on it.”