Keith Gessen - A Terrible Country

“He wants to be a good person,” I said.

“He wants to keep his conscience clean. There’s a difference.”

Whatever bad ideas she’d already had about men, starting with her father, were confirmed, to a tee, by Shipalkin. “He was such a nice boy when we met,” she said. “But he was weak.” Another time: “Did you see that scarf he was wearing when he came by the reading group? He’s very proud of that scarf. Fishman gave it to him, you know. He thinks it’s the latest in American fashion.”

She could be incredibly cutting like this, even cruel. But to be on her side of it was to be exempted. “You’re not like that, are you?” she said one time, when discussing the depredations on this occasion of Misha, who was always getting drunk and cheating on Masha.

“I don’t know,” I said.

But Yulia insisted. “You’re not,” she said. “I can tell.” To be chosen like this to fight on the side of good versus evil—even if you didn’t totally deserve it—was intoxicating. I never wanted to leave.

In retrospect I see there was a kind of baseline pain-in-the-assness to everything we did. We didn’t live that far from each other but neither of us had our own private space and in the end we spent a lot of time walking this way and that. She had an ex who was still sort of hanging around—after the arrests of his friends, Shipalkin had remained in Moscow, writing long self-justifying entries on his LiveJournal page. Yulia said she never wanted to see him again and, as far as I know, she stuck to that resolution. But even without Shipalkin her life was not simple. She had a mother in Kiev who needed help and attention; she lived in her room in shifts and had to constantly change her sheets. On top of that, when we started going out, it was still cold. I remember one night in late March, after seeing another movie, walking along Pokrovka Street, on a sidewalk that was only barely cleared of snow and not cleared of ice at all, so that it was pretty much all you could do to keep from falling down, and passing several cafés that were bright and welcoming. If we’d had more money we could have stopped, but these were places that charged twelve dollars for a pot of tea! So we kept going. I felt embarrassed and unmanned that I could not afford to get my girlfriend out of the cold, but Yulia didn’t even seem to see these places. Eventually we reached a café that had reasonable prices, and for about fifteen minutes we sat there shivering, and then eventually we forgot all about our awful journey, and even split an éclair. The difficulties of being together, staying together, and getting together in the first place made me feel like, if we could just get through this one situation, or the next, that we would be all right pretty much forever.

Yulia’s work situation was lousy. Her college president was corrupt, her department head was corrupt, and in large part as a result of these corruptions they needed more work from the teaching staff. They were especially distrustful of people who didn’t joyfully participate in the corruption, though Yulia, with her private tutoring and ghostwriting, participated more than she would have liked. She did it because she had to but also because, like me, she couldn’t bear to leave. “I have some wonderful students,” she said. “I love talking with them about Avvakum”—one of the crazy old clerics she studied. “Where else would I be able to do that?” Sergei’s answer—do it voluntarily, in the community, on your own time—was not an option. She needed to make money. Yulia was trapped.

We spent hours walking around Moscow—it remained cold well into April—looking for places to sit and drink a tea. I had never dated anyone like Yulia before, and I had never dated anyone in Russian before. At first I found it easy—I could sit happily and watch Yulia talk and it was not necessarily expected that I talk back. But then I started finding it difficult—when accused of something, usually something true, my vocabulary of defense was limited, and my mind short-circuited to anger.

“You have no idea how we’ve lived here,” she said once. We had stopped to eat some dumplings in a small basement cafeteria near the university. The food was cheap and pretty good, and the only problem was that it was in the basement and kind of dark. Also on the way over we’d almost been hit by a falling icicle. In the first part of April, during the days, the temperature would sometimes rise above zero and the sun would come out, melting the winter snow, but then at night the temperature would fall again, freezing into giant icicles the water that had begun to drip from the roofs. As the weather warmed up more consistently, these sharp, massive chunks of ice started falling from the rooftops and killing people. So we had just survived these dangers and I was in a foul mood with regard to Moscow and Russia and in short I said something critical about the lighting in the basement cafeteria, and Yulia got mad. “You have no idea how we’ve lived. You have no idea how valuable a place like this is.”

She was right. I liked the place! I should not have displaced my anger at the icicles onto it. And I think in English I’d have taken Yulia’s defense of it in stride. After being a too-serious little boy I had developed an ironic disposition. Nothing affected me too deeply. Some people I’d known found this off-putting, but in this situation it would have come in handy. I’d have joked her indignation away.

In Russian I didn’t know how, and I was wounded. I threw up my hands like a person who was at the end of his rope, who felt like he couldn’t say anything without being attacked and so therefore had decided to say nothing. I stewed in this non-saying for a while until Yulia relented and forgave me. But I found this sort of thing happening with some regularity; Yulia was a very serious person who sometimes took things to heart, and whether I would have been able to deflect our conversations in the proper direction if they had been happening in English, I don’t know. In Russian I was unable to.

But this was also OK. The same inability to joke, to parry and deflect, made me kinder. I was impatient sometimes, and angry sometimes, but I was never cutting, I was never sarcastic, I never made a quip that took a second to think up and six months, somehow or other, to take back.

For a while I was nervous about introducing Yulia to my grandmother. I worried it might upset the delicate balance we had finally achieved in our domestic arrangement. At the same time, hadn’t she been urging me to get married? Not that Yulia was necessarily intent on marrying me. We had just started going out. But I was thinking about it. I had even asked, idly, if she’d be willing to move to the States. “No,” she said immediately. “My mother is in Kiev and I’m all she has. It’s bad enough that I’m in Moscow. If I moved to America it would kill her.”

“Maybe she can move to America too?” I said.

I imagined all of us—me, Yulia, her mother, my grandmother—living in a big apartment in Brooklyn, taking long walks together in Prospect Park, saying hello to the other Russians, going to movies at the big movie theater at the corner of the park. “OK,” said Yulia. “Are we going to fly there in a golden helicopter?”

Fair enough. But at the time everything seemed possible. “Just think about it,” I said.

So I did very much want to introduce her to my grandmother. And I was wrong to worry. “Yulia,” said my grandmother, when I brought Yulia over one late afternoon. “That’s a very pretty name.” And she laughed as Yulia and I took off our coats and boots. She seemed genuinely happy. We sat down and all drank some tea.

In general, though, my grandmother was suffering. Her stay in the hospital had destroyed her mobility. Where she had previously paced the apartment like an athlete preparing for a test of endurance, she now shuffled from her bedroom to the kitchen and back again. Sometimes she brought her cane and sometimes she didn’t, indicating that the cane was not absolutely necessary. But without it she was off-balance, and survived by holding on to various walls and pieces of furniture. She knew where everything was, deep in her bones, and so no matter the time of night she always managed to hang on to something. Still, it meant we weren’t going on a lot of walks. For the moment, with icicles falling on people’s heads, this was OK, but I wondered if, when the weather turned, she would want to be out again.