Keith Gessen - A Terrible Country

There was consternation among the search committee as they tried to determine whether I was kidding—I wished I had been kidding—and then just at that moment my grandmother walked into the kitchen in her bathrobe. I turned around—she waved. I turned back to the screen, wondering if the people in upstate New York had seen her. From the expressions on their faces I could tell that they had.

“That’s my grandmother,” I murmured.

“Andrew, thank you very much for taking the time to do this,” Sutherland purred. “We know it’s late there.”

I nodded.

“We’ll be in touch,” he said, and I saw him approaching the screen in a weirdly menacing fashion. Watson College disappeared, and then I was staring at the big empty Skype icon.

Two weeks later, while checking the Slavic jobs website, I saw the name Alex Fishman. I saw it before I saw the rest; I was reading right to left. He had accepted an offer from Watson College.

Sometimes you know something bad is going to happen, but it doesn’t help; in fact it’s like you have to experience it twice. I logged on to Facebook. Even after our blowup at dinner I hadn’t had the guts to unfriend Fishman—it just seemed unnecessary, he knew what I thought of him—but I made a point of ignoring his posts. Still, when I saw a big smiling photo of Fishman throwing a gang sign and the name of a college I had once hoped to teach at, I couldn’t help but read his status update. It read: “I’m being shipped upstate! (To teach literature at Watson College!)”

I wondered if there was some comment I could make that would somehow puncture Fishman’s incredible self-regard. Did he know how stupid he looked throwing a gang sign? Did he know that it got really cold up at Watson during the winter? I couldn’t think of anything that wouldn’t also reveal how pathetically jealous I felt.

At that point, really for the first time, I had to face the prospect that I would never get a job. Why for the first time? I don’t know. I had always thought I’d make it through somehow, even in the face of mounting evidence that I would not. Something would turn up; my luck would change; I’d finally make it. Now it looked like I would not.

And that was OK, maybe. I could stay in Russia. Yulia and I could move in together. Or Yulia could move in with me and my grandmother. Or… I would likely be allowed to keep my PMOOC classes for the next year. So I would have some income. Yulia also had some income. I hadn’t broached this with her yet, but I decided now that I would.

AND THEN I put it off. It wasn’t that I had doubts about Yulia. I didn’t. I had doubts about myself. I was still in Moscow because—why? Because I couldn’t get a job in the States and because I wanted to foil Dima’s evil plan to sell our grandmother’s apartment. And—what? It seemed purely negative, reactive, like Russian foreign policy. It was as if I’d lost and failed my way into Yulia’s life. Was this a good foundation on which to build a future?

My yearlong visa was expiring in mid-August, so one way or another I’d have to leave the country and get another one. It would probably mean going back to New York. And if I was going back to New York, it might make sense to spend a month and see if I could drum up some work. In any case, for the moment I was thinking about the summer.

It was almost June and my grandmother had still not discussed her dacha dreams with Emma Abramovna. Or, rather, she had hinted at them numerous times, and Emma Abramovna had not taken her up on the hinting. Finally I decided that I should just go over there and ask.

Emma Abramovna was an intimidating person. She had escaped from Hitler, had been exiled to Siberia as a Polish national, and had maintained her glamorous good looks that had invited a great deal of unwanted male attention, including at one point from the NKVD. Even among the generation that included my grandmother and Uncle Lev, she stood out. In short, as I sat before her, she half lying on her couch with a blanket draped over her lap, me in an armchair across from her, I was sitting before someone who was still quite formidable, no matter her age and condition.

“So what have you been up to in Moscow?” she said.

I told her about my work with October and our soon-to-be-launched website.

“They’re, what, communists?” she asked.

“Socialists,” I said.

“Idiots!” she said. “Socialism has been tried in this country. I lived through it. And I can tell you that the only thing worse is fascism.”

“They’re proposing something different,” I said.

“They all propose something different, and in the end it’s the same. Look at China, Cuba, Cambodia—wherever you go in the socialist world they set up camps, and sometimes worse. No, thank you.”

She started telling me the story of how she’d been kicked out of the Party in 1948 for refusing to question the loyalty of Jewish citizens who supported Israel. (Stalin was convinced that with the creation of Israel, Jews would become a fifth column inside the USSR.) I had heard this story before. But I listened again.

“This group is anti-Stalinist,” I said, when she was done.

“Well, thank God at least for that!” she said. Emma Abramovna was not about to get talked back into socialism by me.

Eventually I got around to what I’d come there for. “Emma Abramovna,” I began, “as you know, Baba Seva lost her dacha in the nineties. Every summer she gets really sad when she has nowhere to go.”

“I know,” said Emma Abramovna. “She tells me all about it.”

“Well, and I was thinking. Maybe she could come stay with you at Peredelkino for a little while? It would make her summer so much better.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Emma Abramovna said right away. She did not seem surprised in the least by the suggestion. She had apparently not been oblivious to my grandmother’s hints. She had just chosen to ignore them.

I, however, was surprised. “Really?” I said. I knew Emma Abramovna’s social life was a little more varied than my grandmother’s, but it didn’t seem like a round-the-clock party. She could fit in my grandmother, I thought. “Why not?” I said.

“Borya and Arkady and their families will be visiting a lot,” Emma Abramovna said. “Really there’s not much space.”

“There won’t even be a week where you’ll have room?” I said, begging now. “You’re her best friend!”

“Well,” said Emma Abramovna, setting her mouth in a way that was unlike her, but then being brutally and entirely honest in a way that was: “she’s not mine.”

And that was that. I was silent, and then Emma Abramovna suggested that we change the subject, and her aide, Valya, brought out some tea and cookies, and I gulped them down as quickly as I could and then took my leave as politely as I could. But I was heartbroken. It was like a door had been shut on my grandmother’s life, and she didn’t even know about it.

As I walked home, I called Yulia to tell her the news.

“That’s very sad,” she said.

“Yes,” I said. “ Starost’ ne radost’ . Know anyone else with a dacha?”

“My mom goes to a sanatorium outside Kiev during the summers. Do you think your grandmother would enjoy that?”

“Maybe, but I don’t think she’d enjoy the trip to Kiev. In fact I’m sure she’d refuse to take it.”

“Yes. Well, maybe Kolya will be done with his dacha in time.”

She said it half jokingly, but it wasn’t the worst idea.

“That hadn’t occurred to me,” I said.

“Of course even if he does finish there won’t be much to look at,” said Yulia. “And nowhere to swim.”