Keith Gessen - A Terrible Country

I didn’t know how to answer. It was the same, yes, in a sense—there were humans in America, they lived their lives, fell in love, had children, tried to provide for them. But it was also not the same. The abundance; the sheer ease of life, at least for people like me; the number and choice and quality of the toiletries: it was not the same. My college dorm room, which I shared with one roommate, was bigger and nicer and better built than this computer programmer’s apartment, which he shared with a wife and child. I tried gently but honestly to explain this. “Well,” said my friend, whom I would never see again though we exchanged addresses and promised to keep in touch, “maybe I’ll get over there someday, see for myself.” And in that moment I thought that I, for my part, would like to stay. In Russia, that is. At least mentally, at least intellectually—it was like no place I had ever been before, though in another sense it was exactly like a place that I had been before, that is to say my childhood, my home.

More than a decade later, a decade of Russian books, Russian classes, Russian academic conferences, a meandering dissertation on Russian literature and “modernity” that no publisher ever responded to, I emerged from the shower—it had a detachable showerhead and no place to attach it, so you had to hold it the entire time—and found my grandmother in her pink bathrobe, leaning over and sipping a coffee with great concentration. I scanned the kitchen, hoping to locate a French press or at least a drip coffee machine, but found only a teakettle and a tin can of instant Nescafé. This was disappointing; over the last few years, as the coffee revolution reached Brooklyn, I had become used to drinking some strong fucking coffee. I resolved—my list of such resolutions was growing—to buy a French press and some normal coffee beans at the first coffee store I found.

My grandmother had her radio tuned to Echo of Moscow, the station of the liberal opposition, and was trying to make sense of the news. The Russian army was reluctantly pulling out of Georgia; the Kremlin was claiming that the Georgians had created a refugee crisis; anti-Kremlin critics blamed Moscow for the war. My grandmother’s radio was small, handheld, and battery-powered, and though she had it playing at full volume and was holding it to her ear, she still seemed uncertain as to what it was saying. She perked up when she saw me. “Ah, you’re up!” she said. “Will you have breakfast?”

I said yes, and as I dressed she fried up some eggs on top of a panful of kasha. When I returned to the kitchen someone on Echo was very sarcastically dismissing Russian claims that Georgia had fired first. “It’s like saying, ‘The mosquito bit me. I had to kill him and all his relatives.’ Of course the mosquito bit you! He’s a mosquito.” I had forgotten that tone the Russian oppositionists always took—“aggrieved” wasn’t the right word for it. It was sarcastic, self-righteous, full of disbelief that these idiots were running the country and that even bigger idiots out there supported them. There was one island of decency, said these voices, and you had found it on your radio dial. I mean, I say that now. In fact it could be intoxicating. Echo, the lone voice of opposition to the regime (by this point all the television channels were firmly under state control): they woke up daily to engage in the battle of good versus evil. But of course you couldn’t outright say on the radio that the regime was evil. That would be too much. So they did it with mockery, sarcasm, subversion. It seemed like a pretty good approximation of what Soviet dissidents must have sounded like back in the 1970s—as if the regime wasn’t the only one that found itself a little nostalgic for that time.

So Russia had invaded Georgia. Or Georgia had invaded a part of Georgia called South Ossetia, and the Russians overreacted. And of course any decent person would agree… I turned it off. I wanted to talk to my grandmother about her medications. Though first I wanted to eat my grandmother’s kasha. It was perfect kasha. I had gone through a period not so long ago of trying to make it, but it always came out mushy.

“Andryush, tell me,” said my grandmother now as she watched me eat. “Where do you live?”

“New York.”

“Where?”

“New York!”

“Oh, New York. Do you live in a house, or an apartment?”

“An apartment.”

“What?”

“An apartment!”

Yesterday she had been wearing a hearing aid, but her hearing now was no worse and no better.

“Do you own the apartment, or do you rent?”

“Rent!” I said very loudly.

“You don’t have to yell,” she said.

“OK.”

“Are you married?”

“No.”

“No?”

“No.”

“Do you have kids?”

“No.”

“No kids?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t have anyone to have them with.”

“Yes,” my grandmother agreed, “that’s true. You need to get married.”

“Grandmother,” I said. “Can I ask you something? I want to help you keep track of your medications. Do you know which of those medications does what for you?”

My grandmother did not look surprised. “I don’t really know,” she said. “But here, I wrote it down in a book.”

And she proceeded to produce a small notebook. There were about a dozen pages, a running list, on which she’d written the names of medications and, occasionally, what they addressed (“heart,” “cough”). Her handwriting had always been large and loopy, but now it was larger and loopier. There was nothing in there about dementia.

I looked up from the notebook to find that my grandmother had gone to the fridge and brought out a bottle of red wine. It was half empty and had the remnants of a cork in its throat. She was wrestling with the cork. “Should we have some wine to celebrate that you’re here?” she said. “I can’t seem to open it.”

It was seven in the morning.

“Maybe later,” I said. “Right now I need to step out for a little bit to check on something. I’ll be back in an hour.”

She looked disappointed. “Do you have to?”

I did. Reluctantly, my grandmother put the wine back in the fridge.

I went into my room and retrieved my laptop and my book bag. As I was about to leave, the phone rang. My grandmother was using the toilet, so I answered. An elderly woman asked for my grandmother; I said she couldn’t come to the phone but that I’d take a message. The woman identified herself as Alla Aaronovna. My grandmother remained in the toilet. I wrote her a note that Alla Aaronovna had called and left it on the kitchen table. Then I headed out.

My grandmother could hardly have been more centrally located—a fifteen-minute walk to the Kremlin—but it took me forty minutes to find a place to check my email.

I hadn’t seen any cafés or internet spots on my way up from the subway the day before, so the first place I headed was the other subway hub, at Clean Ponds, just up the boulevard from our place. It had always been the busiest and most active spot in the neighborhood, and behind the post office there had once been an internet café, filled with sweaty Russian video game addicts. The area was still very busy: next to the subway entrance was the big post office, a McDonald’s, a bedlam of small kiosks selling cell phones, DVDs, and shish kebabs, and a statue of the poet Griboedov. Beyond Griboedev lay the eponymous clean pond. Catercorner from this agglomeration was the giant RussOil building, headquarters of the country’s largest oil company, built in a black marble that seemed to swallow all the light around it. But the old internet café had been replaced by a German bank. There was no wi-fi.