Keith Gessen - A Terrible Country

Before my grandmother or my own natural shyness could stop me, I turned to address the old ladies.

“Hello!” I said. I pulled my grandmother over to them. Several pigeons the old ladies had been feeding with bread scattered loudly as we walked over. “Hello,” I said again, after the pigeons had cleared out. “My name is Andrei. And this is Seva.”

The old ladies nodded—there were three of them—and waited for me to continue.

“Tell me,” I said, not really knowing what else to say, “what are your plans for the summer?”

The old ladies exchanged what seemed like amused looks. Then one of them, who was sitting in the middle and had a half loaf of white bread in her hand, spoke up. “We’re going to be sitting right here, where else are we gonna go?” she said. “Not like some people who’re probably going to Israel for the summer.”

The sudden invocation of Israel wiped the polite smile from my face, which I suppose was the intended effect.

“How’s that?” I said. “Why Israel?”

“Well, isn’t that where Seva Efraimovna ’s going to go?” said the woman. She put a lot of stress on my grandmother’s obviously Jewish patronymic. The other two women snickered their approval.

“No,” I said uselessly. “She doesn’t have any relatives there.”

“No?” said the woman. “Maybe she’ll go to America then. There’s plenty of your kind there, right?”

Now the other two women were really enjoying it. One of them clapped her hands in delight. My heart was racing. I had never met an actual, real-live anti-Semite before. I felt my grandmother beside me; I couldn’t tell how much of this she could hear, but I think she sensed the hostility of these women, and knew what they were about. For my part, I couldn’t believe it. And yet what could I do? Was I going to stand there and yell at them? Or fight them?

I stood for a few long moments, just kind of staring, and then without saying anything I turned with my grandmother—her hand was looped around my elbow, so we turned together—and walked away.

“Good-bye, Jews!” the women called after us, and laughed.

Still, it was a beautiful summer. One Sunday in June, Misha, Boris, Yulia, and I borrowed Sergei’s car and took a trip out to a place called Petrovo, a few hours south of Moscow. Misha and Boris had found it at random on a map. They pretended that the trip was for my benefit, so that I could see “the real Russia,” but they were obviously curious as well. In Petrovo we found a simple Soviet town, with the old 1950s five-story apartment buildings called Khrushchevki, a grocery store that sold local vodka, a department store where you could still buy the old Russian-made pots and pans and can openers that my grandmother’s apartment was filled with. “This is real Russian vodka,” Misha said when we went to the grocery store, and “These are real Russian utensils,” he said at the department store; and when we went to an old-fashioned cafeteria and ate cold borscht and cucumber salad, he informed us that “this is a real Russian cafeteria and this is real Russian cuisine.”

“It will give you,” said Yulia, “a real Russian stomachache.” Everyone laughed. I realized then how much in common I had with all of them, more than I realized; they remembered this Soviet world from their childhoods just as I remembered it from mine. They were, in a way, as nostalgic for it as I was. On our way home, we pulled off the road so that Misha, who’d had a few beers in the cafeteria, could go to the bathroom. The dirt road we found ourselves on was so narrow that we couldn’t turn around and had to keep going until we reached an opening; we ended up at an old Soviet schoolhouse, obviously abandoned. SCHOOL NUMBER 3, it said over the entrance. It was dusk when we came to the school, and the broken windows and trash piled up near it gave it a kind of haunted aspect.

“You know,” said Boris, “most of the rest of the country is like this.” He turned the car around and we sped back toward the main road.

A few weekends later, Yulia and I took a trip to Kiev so that I could meet her mother. Sophia Nikolaevna lived alone in one of the crumbling high-rise blocks on Kiev’s Right Bank; she was approaching sixty, and hadn’t worked in over a decade. Yulia had warned me that in her loneliness and disappointment her mother had fallen victim to the infowar between Russia and Ukraine that would eventually, some years later, turn into a shooting war. Sophia Nikolaevna was an ethnic Russian; this didn’t used to matter in Ukraine, but now it could, if you let it, and she let it by consuming Russian television, which warned her that soon the Russian language would be banned in Ukraine. There were times, Yulia told me, that she told Yulia she feared leaving the house because she thought she’d be outed as a Russian. “If she starts railing against the government, just ignore her,” said Yulia as we took the subway to her childhood apartment. The Kiev subway was identical in just about every way to the Moscow subway, but older and poorer (and about five times cheaper), and the announcements were in Ukrainian (as it turned out, and contrary to Sophia Nikolaevna’s fears, this was just about the only Ukrainian I heard while in Kiev). Yulia’s mother was much sweeter and more together than advertised. Aside from complimenting my Russian, which, given that she was such a brave defender of the Russian language, I took as high praise, she kept her rantings about the government to herself. If anything, I found her a little distant.

“Thank you for visiting me, my friend,” she said. “You didn’t have to do that.” I couldn’t tell if this was a commentary on her sense of her own unimportance, or an expression of skepticism toward my commitment to her daughter. Or some combination.

“I’m happy to finally meet you,” I said.

“Thank you, my friend,” answered Sophia Nikolaevna.

Yulia’s childhood room was filled with books, and the walls were covered with little drawings, in goauche, that she had done as a teenager. The apartment, on the sixth floor, was small—three rooms, low ceilings, a tiny kitchen—but it was tidy and lived-in. The building itself and the neighborhood were a different story. The elevator smelled like someone had died in it. The entrance had been graffitied over a hundred times. It was surrounded by identical buildings, some small grocery stores, and a fast-food chicken place where Yulia and I sneaked off for lunch.

“This place was OK when I was growing up here,” said Yulia. “It was full of children. Every winter they would make an ice rink in front of our building and everyone would go skating.”

To reach the chicken spot, we had walked through what seemed like a series of abandoned lots full of trash and broken glass (but no furniture—Ukrainians were too poor to throw out furniture). Once upon a time this was meant to be a tree-lined play area for children. That was hard to picture now.

“It was very different,” Yulia said. “It wasn’t just physically different, it was morally different. People had work and they weren’t ashamed of themselves. They were poor, but poverty is relative. Remember the immiseration thesis? ‘As capital accumulates, the situation of the worker, be his payment high or low , must grow worse.’ The reverse is also true. People can be poor without suffering, as long as they are not abandoned, as long as they don’t perceive themselves to be abandoned. My mother was poor under Communism but she had a job, she had access to medical care, she could look me in the eye and tell me things would be OK and believe it. She was a happy person. That person you see in there is not her.”

The next day Yulia took me around the city; she showed me the Maidan, where people had massed together to form the Orange Revolution in 2004, and the huge old churches on the hills above it, and finally the house-museum of Mikhail Bulgakov, whom Yulia loved. “He wasn’t a socialist,” she said, “and he didn’t like Jews. But he was a good writer and a pretty good person. That counts.”