Keith Gessen - A Terrible Country

It didn’t matter. I wasn’t going to do it. I didn’t have it in me. A better person would have done it, I think. I bet Sergei would have done it. He had told me the other day that he was finally leaving his wife. “It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” he said. “But it’s better this way.” He couldn’t lie, was his problem. And I felt like if an elderly person, a little grandmother, in pain, had asked him to kill her, he would have done it. Yet I could not.

I was beginning to wonder if I had promised more to the people around me than I could deliver. If I had made myself out to be a better person than I could be. I couldn’t shake the occasional feeling that I was in over my head.

AND YET, AND YET, and yet. I loved it. I loved kasha and kotlety and I loved the language and I loved the hockey guys and I even loved some of the people on the street. I loved walking down Sretenka with my hockey gear in my Soviet backpack, taking the subway one stop, emerging at Prospekt Mira and then walking to the stadium past the McDonald’s, the Orthodox church, the market where we failed to buy my grandmother slippers, and then into the rink. Late at night, on my way home, I loved sometimes buying half a chicken from the Azeri guys. “Our hockey friend!” they always said, greeting me. On nights when I went to see Yulia, I loved taking a car for three dollars—a flat one hundred rubles, who could argue. One time I caught a car home from her place, up the Garden Ring, at two in the morning. The driver was in his early twenties, of indeterminate ethnicity. When I got in the car he took his mobile phone from the radio slot, in case I was a cop or something, but once I was seated he put it back in again, and as we picked up speed on the Garden Ring I saw that it was playing a film— 300 , I think, about the Spartan battle with the Persians in 480 B.C. We raced down the Garden Ring, my driver and I, occasionally looking up at the road, occasionally looking down at the Spartans in chroma-key, holding off Xerxes’ army.

One night in early June, Yulia decided to have a dinner party. She invited the Marxist reading group and two of her friends from her graduate program, who were not Marxists. On the way over I walked down to the fancy grocery store next to the KGB. They had a whole huge section devoted to vodka. This was a stereotype about Russians, most of whom preferred beer most of the time, but it was also true: in addition to beer, they liked vodka. It was a matter of geography. It was too cold in Russia to grow grapes; it was too dry to age whiskey deliciously in barrels. And so Russians, like Finns and Swedes and Poles, drank a clear, wheat- or potato-based liquor. That is to say, they drank vodka. In the fancy supermarket next to the KGB the vodka section ran the gamut from insanely cheap to moderately cheap. The government kept the vodka tariffs low because they knew that if vodka became too expensive, people would start making it in their bathtubs and dying. From the cheapest to the most expensive, the vodka bottles were clear, and the light of the store refracted through them as through crystals, and I walked through the aisle, choosing my vodka, like Superman in that chamber on Krypton where the tribal elders used to meet before their planet was destroyed. Once I picked out my vodka I also got some high-quality herring. The whole thing ran me fifteen dollars. “Having a party?” the middle-aged cashier, her hair dyed red, said to me as she scanned my items.

“Just meeting up with some friends,” I said.

“Bon appétit.”

“Thank you.”

I left the store in a state of near exaltation. I had never had such a pleasant interaction with a Russian cashier. But in recent weeks I’d had such interactions more and more. I thought, perhaps, that when I’d first arrived they’d smelled fear on me, and worry, and displacement. I had shed it now. I was an émigré. I had left. Now I’d returned. The night before, at hockey, Oleg had come off the ice looking annoyed after I flubbed a pass to him from the corner—but the fact was that I’d had to fight off two defenders from the white team and I still had Grisha draped on my back when I made the pass.

“Andrei,” said Oleg, “what was up with that pass?”

“Oleg, fuck your mother!” I cried, finally losing it. “Stop making a long face all the time! Play hockey! If the puck doesn’t come to you, go get it, you lazy fuck!”

I was mildly horrified by my own outburst, especially as Oleg had been having a rough time recently—the guys he was renting to, about whom the rest of the team had warned him, had stopped paying their rent and declared that they were going to take over the space as their own—but after I swore at him Oleg just laughed.

“Antosha,” he said, turning to Anton. “Did you hear that? Andrei’s yelling just like us now!”

I felt very proud. Now, coming out of the supermarket, I decided to hail a car—I was running late, the streets were clear, and there wasn’t a good subway to catch from where I was to reach Yulia’s. I got a car quickly and sat down in the front seat. My driver was from the Caucasus somewhere (most of the guys who picked you up at this point, although they drove Russian cars, were not Russian—they were from the poorer countries south of Russia), and as we reached Pushkin Square he turned to me and said, “Where you from? Argentina?”

It was a question that had freaked me out when I first arrived. Now I just said, “I’m from here.” Which was true. “But I’m Jewish.”

“Oh, yeah?” said the cabdriver. “I’m Jewish too. Ever hear of the mountain Jews of Georgia?”

I had not.

“We’ve been there thousands of years,” he said. Then he asked, “You know Yiddish?”

“No.”

“I do. They taught us there, up in the mountains.”

“Wow,” I said, and meant it.

I was in a great mood when I showed up at Yulia’s. It was past ten already but that was all right. Russians keep late hours. They think nothing of starting dinner at ten o’clock. Especially now that the air was a little warmer and the sun set later in the day.

Dinner had not yet been served. People were out on the balcony, smoking and drinking beer. Yulia was wearing her pretty white cotton dress with flowers on it. She kissed me hello and directed me to the balcony. Out there Sergei was talking about a new branch of October that had started up in Saratov. “The comrades from Saratov,” he called them. Apparently the comrades from Saratov came from the antifa movement, which spent some of its time engaging in street fights with neo-Nazis, and though this group had decided to go socialist they had brought some of their old ways with them to October. “If it wasn’t for all the knife fighting,” Sergei summed up, “the comrades from Saratov would be worth their weight in gold.” After breaking up with his wife he had moved back in with his parents, and he seemed quite happy.

Yulia had gone into the kitchen after taking me to the balcony and she now called everyone in to eat.

Yulia tended to make up for a lack of quality in her cooking with volume. She and her roommates, some of whom were superior cooks, had made potatoes and kotlety and salad and even cabbage pie. We drank the vodka I brought—everyone else had brought wine or beer—and pronounced various toasts.

At some point people started talking about whether they’d leave the country.

“I would, I think,” said Misha. “Academically there’s only so much I can accomplish here. If I want to do serious work I need to go to Germany or Britain or the U.S. But I’d hope to come back eventually.”

“Like Lenin,” said Boris.

Everyone laughed. That was the consensus, it seemed—people were willing to leave temporarily, but they intended, like Lenin, to return. I waited for Yulia to say something—I wondered if she’d take a different position, in this context, than she did with me. But she remained silent.