Keith Gessen - A Terrible Country

I retreated to Sretenka and then walked north, along the commercial strip that Sretenka had become. It was a cute, European sort of street, narrower than most, with travel agencies and restaurants and bars, an experimental theater, a Hugo Boss store, and a shitty bookstore with the latest blockbusters in the window that also appeared to have a strip club on the second floor—there was an unlit neon sign hanging before it in the shape of a naked woman. At half past seven in the morning the street was waking up: gleaming black foreign cars sped by on their way out of the center, and once in a while a nicely dressed man or woman stepped out of one while speaking on a sleek mobile phone. This was not the Russia I remembered. I found several European-style cafés, with small tables and little signs in the window that said WI-FI. But they were incredibly expensive. The cheapest item on the menu, a tea, was two hundred rubles—almost nine dollars. On the one hand I needed to figure out if my grandmother had run out of medication for her dementia; on the other hand, nine dollars for a cup of tea. The cafés were filled with nicely dressed Russians, sipping outrageously priced cappuccinos. What the fuck.

I retreated again to our intersection: my grandmother lived just off the corner of Sretenka and the boulevard, although on the other side of the boulevard Sretenka turned into Bolshaya Lubyanka, which headed down to Lubyanka Square, the headquarters of the old KGB, now the FSB. I walked that way now. Compared with Sretenka, just a minute away, it was a desolate walk, as if the organization—thousands of people had been shot in its basement during the terror of the 1930s—had frightened off small businesses. That my grandmother lived so close to the KGB had always been a weird fact of her Moscow existence—on the one hand, central Moscow was where the good property was, so she was very lucky, and on the other hand, it was also where they’d had their execution chambers. It was like living down the street from Auschwitz.

But I needed to check my email.

I walked along the wide, quiet street until I arrived at the KGB. It was a massive building made of dark, heavy granite and it loomed over a large, open rotary, which had once been anchored by a giant statue of the KGB’s founder, Felix Dzerzhinsky. But Dzerzhinsky had been taken down in 1991, and the only thing that remained at the center of the rotary was his pedestal, which had been converted into a giant flowerpot.

To my delight and surprise, however, just off this massive and still terrifying square there was a small comfortable café, the Coffee Grind, with cute little tables, wi-fi, and a chalkboard menu on which I spied at least one drink—their signature cappuccino—for a reasonable seventy-five rubles, three dollars. Maybe it was subsidized by the KGB. Well, good. They owed us. I approached the counter. “Hello!” the pretty barista said, as if she was happy to see me. I ordered the cappuccino and sat down.

I now had only fifteen minutes to check my email if I wanted to be back within the hour. I found Dima’s message with the medical instructions and quickly copied it into a notebook; I then wrote him a short note to ask why there was an exercise bike in my room and also whether he knew if the wireless in his apartment was working. Then I Googled “dementia.” It was a catchall term that included Alzheimer’s. Did my grandmother have Alzheimer’s? I was out of time. I gave myself exactly sixty seconds to look at the Slavic jobs listings website. This was an anonymous site where people posted leads on new jobs and also complaints about their job search. (“I can tell you right now this job is slated for the inside candidate.” “One of the older professors on the search committee is a real creep. He spent the entire interview staring at my boobs.”) This wasn’t the only way to find out about new jobs, but it was the most fun. Today there was nothing. I gave myself thirty seconds to look at Facebook. My old classmates were arriving at their new posts as college professors. There were photos of new offices, requests for syllabus tips (as a way of reminding everyone: I’m a college professor!), and other stuff I thought I would no longer find upsetting once I was halfway across the world. But I still found it upsetting. Alex Fishman, my nemesis from the Slavic department, had posted a beautiful photo of Princeton, where he was starting a post-doc. What a dickhead. I shut the computer, stuck it in my bag, and went back into the street.

It was eight o’clock in the morning now and even sleepy, scary Bolshaya Lubyanka was stirring to life. Expensive German cars bounced out of the rotary and sped toward Sretenka; others pulled into a large open-air parking lot that must have been for the FSB. Some of the cars made their way onto the sidewalk and parked there; elegantly dressed men and women, on their way to work, maneuvered around them, as if it was perfectly ordinary that someone would park on a sidewalk.

The women, I couldn’t help but notice, were exceptionally attractive. In the four blocks between the Coffee Grind and our house I must have seen a dozen very good-looking women. And there was something about them, about their uniformity. They were all thin, blonde, thirtyish, in black pencil skirts, white blouses, and high heels. I don’t know why I liked the fact that they all looked alike, but I did.

The men too fit a pattern. Big, kasha fed, six feet tall, stuffed into expensive suits, balancing themselves on shiny, pointy-toed shoes, never smiling. Ten years ago you walked down a Moscow street and ran into a lot of thugs in cheap leather jackets. Those guys were gone now, replaced by these guys. Or maybe they were the same guys? They hogged the sidewalk; they barreled ahead without looking to see what was in the way; they kept their hands by their sides and their fists clenched, like they were ready to use them. I had just come from the land of dudes who grew beards, wore shorts, smiled always at some secret melody playing in their heads, and sipped their coffees as they slowly rode their bikes up Bedford Avenue. This was the opposite of that.

One other thing I noticed: Everyone was white. Some were blond and blue-eyed, others had brown hair and hazel eyes, and some were a little darker, Armenian or Jewish, but still white. The construction sites, meanwhile, were manned by Central Asians, short and thin, while Central Asian women, in orange vests, tidied up the various courtyards.

Before returning home I ducked into a tiny grocery at the corner of Bolshaya Lubyanka and the boulevard. It smelled bad and the two women behind the counter seemed annoyed to have a customer. Beer took up most of the small space, but they also had cold cuts—that must have been the source of the smell—and, more important, what I was looking for: sushki . These were round, crunchy, slightly sweet bread rings. Because they were a little sweet you could have them with tea, but because they weren’t too sweet you could also have them with beer. I bought two packets, one with poppy seeds, one without. Unlike everything else in the new Russia, sushki were still cheap.

When I got home, my grandmother was sitting at the kitchen table, with four little phone books spread out before her. She didn’t hear me come in and I saw her slowly reading through one of them, repeating “Alla Aaronovna” to herself, searching for the name.

“Andryush,” she said when she finally saw me, “were you the one who left me this note?”

I nodded.

“I can’t find an Alla Aaronovna anywhere. Are you sure that’s who it was?”

I was sure. I should have asked for her number! But she sounded certain that my grandmother would know exactly who she was.

My grandmother looked down helplessly at her many phone books. “Andryushenka,” she said, holding one out to me like an offering. “Can you find it in here?”