Keith Gessen - A Terrible Country

I never got around to it, of course. There were many things I didn’t get around to.

One Sunday in late April Yulia and I finally made the long trip to Nikolai’s dacha. We met up in the middle of the Novokuznetskaya subway station and took the orange line all the way to the southern end. Then we caught a bus, rode it for half an hour into emptiness, got off, and walked a mile along a patchily paved road until we reached Nikolai’s dacha settlement, and then Nikolai’s dacha itself.

It was at this point half built. The frame of the house—a small two-story colonial—was done, the windows and doors were in, there was even a functioning staircase installed, but the bathroom and kitchen were missing, there was no railing on the staircase, and the walls weren’t painted—that was our task for the day, to start painting—and dacha season was fast approaching. The yard was a mess, with trees and bushes and tall grass all seemingly falling into one another. It wasn’t clear that Nikolai was going to make it before dacha season began, or even before the fall.

The location left something to be desired. There just wasn’t much in the way of nature. No woods, no lake, no river. There was a huge abandoned quarry, but it wasn’t filled with water; you could climb around in it, but that was all. There was a field nearby, but it was just a big field of mud.

“So what do you guys think?” Nikolai said happily, after we’d taken a quick tour. We were, it turned out, the first ones to have come out to help.

“It’s pretty close to being done?” Yulia said gently.

“Yes! You should have seen it just last year,” said Nikolai enthusiastically. “It was a hole in the ground.”

“And now it’s an aboveground hole,” Yulia whispered to me. In Russian “hole” meant a depression in the ground but also a dump. It was difficult to imagine Nikolai’s dacha being anything else.

We spent the day painting the walls of one of the upstairs rooms. It was hard work and it was still cold enough outside that we didn’t want to have the windows open too much, but at the same time the fumes were bad enough that we didn’t want the windows closed entirely. Nikolai tried to entertain us by playing music on his phone but the sound quality was bad and Yulia kept asking him to skip songs. Finally, toward evening, we finished. Nikolai had dragged an old wooden bench and chair from somewhere and plunked them down in the jumble of weeds in the back, so after we were done we sat on these and drank vodka and ate the black bread and salami he had prepared for this occasion. He was thrilled. “That’s the first room we’ve painted, so two more rooms upstairs, all the hallways, and the entire downstairs—probably seven more days like this,” he said. “But before we do the downstairs we need to put in the kitchen and the bathroom.” He was counting it up on his fingers. “Maybe we’ll be done by June!”

He had been living there on weekends, sleeping on the floor, and waking up and working for as long as he could stand it. Nikolai, I had by this point learned, was a programmer at an outfit that perpetrated various online scams mostly to do with gaming advertising revenues; Nikolai said they mostly targeted major corporations and would eventually cause capitalism to collapse. He probably made more money than anyone else in October, and was now spending all of it on this dacha, but he didn’t mind. “This was the inheritance my father left me,” he said. “This is it. A piece of land in a shitty dacha settlement in a very hard-to-reach area. But that was all he had to give, and I’ve taken it. When we’re done here we can all use it. We can even have retreats here for the group. Hell, if things go wrong it can be a safe house!”

“It can’t be a safe house and a meeting place,” Yulia said, not unkindly. “Either it’s official or it’s a secret. Given that your name is on it, it probably shouldn’t be a secret.”

“OK, OK,” said Nikolai. “Anyway, who says things need to go wrong?”

By the time we left it was dark; Nikolai walked us to the bus stop and then headed back to his dacha, to keep building.

“It’s impressive that he’s done so much,” I said, once we got on the creaky old bus and Nikolai retreated into the distance.

“We’ll see if he finishes,” said Yulia. “God, I’m so tired.”

We got back to her place around ten, both of us so exhausted that we immediately went to sleep in our clothes. I woke up at around midnight, just before Katya was supposed to return, kissed Yulia good-bye, and headed home.

A few days later, Dima Gchatted me to say that he had lost the final hearing on his case; he had expected as much, but this put an end to the story of his gas stations.

“I’m wiped out,” he said. “I need to move on the apartments.”

“When?”

“In the next couple of months,” he said.

“Both of them?”

“Yes.” Pause. “Sorry.”

“No,” I typed before I could think better of it. “We’re not moving Grandma. She’s weak and the only reason she can get around this apartment is because she knows where everything is.”

There was also something that I didn’t say, which was that two months after submitting my Watson application, and six weeks after submitting my Slavic Review article, I hadn’t heard a peep from either place.

“OK,” said Dima. “How much longer is she going to be able to get up those stairs?”

“She gets up them OK now, with my help.”

“You’re going to stay there and help her up the stairs indefinitely?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Are you fucking serious?” Dima was typing very quickly. “Have you looked out the window recently? Do you have any fucking clue what’s going on in that country?”

“I’ve looked out the window,” I said.

“You don’t have a clue,” Dima said. He could be very charming when he wanted something; he could also be mean. Sometimes, of course, he was right. Maybe in this case he was right. At some level I really didn’t have a clue.

But also he was wrong. I liked it here. And I was not going to let him evict our grandmother.

A week after this conversation he wrote to say that a prospective buyer interested in just our grandmother’s apartment was coming over and would I at least let him look at the place? If he made an offer we could decide then. But I wasn’t interested. I asked the Marxist reading group to come over and stage a small protest in the courtyard. They relished the opportunity. They made little signs that said HANDS OFF OUR GRANDMOTHERS! and NOUVEAUX RICHES NOT WELCOME HERE! When the buyer showed up and saw this, he didn’t even get out of his Mercedes-Benz. I watched him from my grandmother’s bedroom. That evening I got a short email from Dima. “You’re an idiot,” it said. “Buyer is out. You’re on your own.”

Good, I thought. Good.

A week later he sold his apartment to a Bulgarian arms dealer named Miklos, who had been the one who wanted to buy both. “Four hundred grand,” Dima wrote me. “The agent said we were lucky. If we sit on Grandma’s place any longer, the market’s going to collapse right out from under us.”

“Sorry,” I wrote him. “I’m not going.”

“Whatever,” said Dima.

Miklos told the soldiers they could stay until the end of the summer.

I would be sad to see them go.

IT WAS FINALLY SPRING. The snow melted and for a few weeks everything was muddy, but the sun shone and it was warm and my grandmother and I started going for walks again. I had rejected Dima’s plan to sell the apartment on instinct; beyond that I didn’t really know what to do. If I was going to stay here, Yulia and I should try to move in together. I could displace Katya and move into Yulia’s room, but that was the room she lived in with Shipalkin before they broke up—a bad idea. She could come live with me and my grandmother, and I could replace the bunk beds or just place them side by side—but as Yulia had thus far not even agreed to sleep over this was maybe a stretch. I walked up and down the boulevard with my grandmother, trying to figure it out.