Keith Gessen - A Terrible Country

THEN IN MID-MAY, a couple of weeks after my grandmother’s party, I got an incredible bit of news. The Slavic Review had accepted my paper on Sergei’s radical reeducation program. I sent a short note about this to the Watson College hiring committee. The cochair of the committee (alongside my old almost-employer Richard Sutherland), a German professor at Watson named Constanza Kotz, wrote back right away that this was good news and could I send the paper? I did so. Professor Kotz then wrote again to say that the committee would like to add me to the short list of candidates and could I send some dates when I would be available to come for a campus visit and interview? If I could not make it in person, Kotz suggested that we could get it done over Skype. She added, in a private note, that the committee had been impressed by my commitment to teaching and my previous contributions to Watson College but had been worried by my lack of publications. They still had this worry but a little less so, given the Slavic Review acceptance, and looked forward to meeting me in person, or over Skype, as the case may be.

I was at the windowsill when I received the email and I jumped up from my chair—it was easier to do than from a normal sitting position, since I was already astride the chair—and pumped my fist like I had just won a great victory. I sort of had. I owed it all to Sergei and October. We didn’t have hockey that night, but we did the next night, and I couldn’t wait to thank him in person.

But first I saw Yulia, and she did not feel about it quite the way that I did.

“So you used Sergei and the rest of us to get a job interview in America,” she said.

“What?”

We were in her kitchen. Yulia had made us some hot dogs, and I was eating them with black bread and a beer when I told her about the interview. Their kitchen was large enough for a small aluminum-topped table, and it had a door to the balcony.

“You converted our work into cultural capital,” Yulia said. “Yes or no?”

Her face had grown hard and she wasn’t looking at me as she said this.

“Well, yes, I suppose, but that’s what I do, it’s what we do, we write about things,” I said. “Is it wrong to write about things? Karl Marx wrote about things.”

I was still happily eating, not quite understanding how pissed Yulia was.

“Marx wrote so he could transform the world,” she said. “You wrote so you could get a job at a college with a nice lawn.”

“Who says it has a nice lawn?”

“I looked it up online.”

The campus did have a small old-fashioned quad, but that wasn’t its most salient feature. “It’s also right next to a federal penitentiary!” I said.

“Great,” said Yulia, “you can make yourself feel better by tutoring prisoners.”

I had not seen this side of Yulia before, though I had always known it was there. I had seen it directed at economic injustice, at her father, at Shipalkin. But not yet at me. I put my fork down.

“You know,” I said, “I had thought you guys might feel this way. When I started out I thought you would. But since then I’ve joined October. I’ve translated tons of articles for a website that still doesn’t exist. I’ve been to all the protests. At this point I think it’s unfair.”

Yulia didn’t say anything.

“Anyway,” I went on now, I couldn’t stop myself, “I’m not taking the job.”

“No, you should take it. You’d be crazy not to take it.”

“If I get it, will you come with me?”

“I already told you no.”

“Then I’m not taking it.”

“You have to take it. It’s a good job, you said so yourself.”

We had discussed the job a couple of times, mostly in the context of my saying that I would probably never get it.

“It’s not good enough.”

“It’s not?”

“Not if you’re not coming.”

“OK, you know what, don’t do anything heroic, all right? Let’s see if you get the job. Then we can have this conversation.”

I said OK and it was in fact OK—there was no reason to have a big fight over something that might not even occur. At the same time my feelings were hurt.

“Do you really think that?” I said, later in the evening.

“Think what?”

“That I’m just using you and Sergei to advance my academic career?”

“I don’t know,” said Yulia. “You tell me.”

This answer made me furious. I got out of bed and put on my jeans. I was leaving.

“Where are you going?” said Yulia. “Katya’s not back until morning.” She and Anton had taken a weekend trip to Suzdal.

“I’m going home,” I said. “The metro’s closing soon and I want to be there when my grandmother gets up. Or do you think I’m using her too?”

Yulia shrugged. I saw the same look on her face as I’d seen when she was telling me about Shipalkin in the wake of his release. It was a look that expressed grave disappointment and disgust at human weakness, and especially at male human weakness. Women had it much, much worse than men, and yet they bore it somehow. Why couldn’t we? Were we such pussies? That is what that look said. And obviously, strictly speaking, she was right. But I thought, at that moment, that it was unfair to give that look to me.

I walked out without saying anything more, and she let me. She called me while I was on the subway and I ignored it. She called me again when I got home and this time I answered.

“Andryushik,” she said when I picked up the phone. She was crying. “I’m sorry. I don’t know why I reacted that way. I mean, I do know. I don’t want you to leave me. I don’t want you to go to America. But I wasn’t being fair. If you get the job you should take it.”

“I won’t get the job,” I said. “But if I get it, come with me?”

“I can’t!” she said, crying harder. “I can’t leave my mother. Don’t you understand that?”

I thought of my grandmother, who also didn’t have anyone.

Something about Yulia crying—I’d never seen or heard her do it before—was contagious. I started crying too.

“Yul’,” I said, “I love you.”

“I love you too,” she said.

“We’ll think of something,” I said.

She sobbed. “Do you promise?”

This was a really pathetic scene. I was getting tears and snot on my cell phone. And how could I promise anything? I had no money and lived with my grandmother and the best thing I had going for me just then—a Skype interview with Watson—was also, it was turning out, the worst. Nonetheless, I thought we would think of something. I thought I would think of something. “I promise,” I said.

“Do you want me to come over?” said Yulia.

“Right now?” I asked.

“I can call a cab. It’ll be cheap.”

“OK,” I said. “Call me when you’re pulling in and I’ll come out.”

She slept over that night, and in the morning the three of us had breakfast.

“Yulia,” my grandmother kept saying, and forgetting that she was saying it. “Yulia. What a beautiful name.”

I agreed.

Then, after all the hopes and arguments, I blew the interview. Maybe I shouldn’t have done it over Skype, but I didn’t have seven hundred dollars lying around to go flying to America. And anyway the connection on the windowsill was fine. That wasn’t the problem.

The problem was me. I had spent so many years worrying that I would never get this opportunity that I was crazy with nerves. I kept interrupting the very kindly professors who asked me soft-ball questions, and then interrupting myself. The low point of the interview came when they asked me how I would try to arrest declining enrollment in Russian literature classes, and I started giving them a talk, which I didn’t believe, about the pop culture relevance of certain Russian writers. I even said something along the lines of “Pushkin was a Tupac figure.” There was a pause. “You know, because he got shot.”