Keith Gessen - A Terrible Country

Kiev was a more naturally beautiful city than Moscow, and also a calmer one. Five million people lived there but you never felt hurried or rushed. It was much poorer too. Ukraine had few natural resources and had fumbled the post-Soviet transition. For a visitor, this meant everything was cheap. We walked around the church grounds and ate ice cream. Yulia seemed happy and relaxed here in a way she rarely did in Moscow.

I felt like she was trying to tell me something by bringing me to Kiev, introducing me to her mother, showing me around. Perhaps she was saying, “This is why I can’t leave. It would be cowardly to do so.” Or perhaps she was saying, “This is serious. You know everything about me now. Make a move.” Sitting in the chicken place listening to her talk about her childhood, then walking among the thirteenth-century churches on the hill above the city center, then in her favorite bar, the Kupidon, where I drank a giant Ukrainian beer, I kept thinking that I should propose to her that we bind our lives together. Maybe Sophia Nikolaevna could move to Moscow. She and my grandmother could keep each other company. Or maybe we should all move to Kiev. We could live like kings in impoverished Kiev. I kept thinking in all these spots of how to phrase it, and if I should phrase it, and guessing what she’d say.

But I didn’t do it. I was in part still wondering if there might not be some job opening that could happen, some stroke of luck—I wanted to prove to Yulia and my grandmother and myself that I wasn’t a failure, that I could provide for all of us in some other way than by selling off my grandmother’s old apartment. So I waited. And waited. And then things took on a momentum of their own.

The highlight of the summer was our trip to Nikolai’s dacha. There had been some delays and cost overruns, but by mid-July it was done. Nikolai spent a week there in triumph, and then turned it over, for a week, to us.

There was no way we were going to force my grandmother to take the hell journey to the dacha on public transportation, so I borrowed Sergei’s rickety old Lada. Then I had to drive. I had never driven in Moscow before, and it was terrifying. It was not just that it was a big city. It was a tremendously confusing one. The side streets were narrow; the radial avenues were enormous; on certain long stretches of the major avenues traffic lights had been eliminated, making it basically impossible to turn left. On my first drive home from hockey, where Sergei had handed me the keys to the car, I missed my left turn onto Tsvetnoi Boulevard from the Garden Ring and then could not figure out how to pull a U-turn. I tried once to take a right and another right and another so as to return to the Ring and take a left, sending me back where I came from, but I ended up in the wrong lane and had to take a right again. Finally I decided it would be easier to just remain on the Garden Ring and go all the way around. It was late and traffic was relatively light and it only took forty minutes to get back to Tsvetnoi Boulevard again and take my damn left.

The other factor I encountered, once we had packed the car with our stuff and my grandmother, was that the cars were going at different speeds. In New York most cars are as aggressive as they can be; once you get used to this, you can anticipate it. In Moscow drivers were equally aggressive, but it was hard to anticipate exactly how it would play out in practice because cars had different capabilities. There were plenty of Mercedeses and Audis—these cars were quick. On the other end of the spectrum were old Russian cars, like mine—these cars had limited acceleration. And in between were newer Russian cars, some of which looked like they’d be able to accelerate, but in fact could not. So while everyone wanted to be a daredevil/asshole, not everyone could go at the same speed, and this added a layer of complexity to an already difficult situation.

Somehow we arrived at the dacha without incident. I hadn’t been there in a few weeks and Nikolai had clearly continued to improve it. The main thing was that he’d cleared out the yard. The weeds and overgrowth were gone, leaving a clearing, not yet quite covered with grass, and a few select bushes that had a bit more shape to them. My grandmother, upon seeing one, immediately said, “Raspberries!” She was right. She approached it and started pulling down raspberries and eating them.

And thus we spent the week. There was a cot on the first floor where my grandmother could sleep so she didn’t have to tackle the stairs, and while the tiny grocery store was a little too far to walk, we were able to drive there every morning and pick up what we needed—they had potatoes, beets, cabbage, and bread. Every other day a local farmer set up a small fruit and vegetable stand outside the store, where we got tomatoes, cucumbers, and some greens. Finally, at Nikolai’s suggestion, Yulia and I drove out about an hour one day to a village where we were able to go door-to-door and buy eggs. We had to go door-to-door because the most eggs we could buy from any one person was two. That seemed to be all they had. But we kept going until we had twenty eggs. One woman also sold us some cottage cheese. Between the two of us, and with conceptual input from my grandmother, we were able to make enough food to feed us, and everyone was satisfied.

For all of Nikolai’s heroics there was no changing the fact that the house was in the middle of nowhere. We did not wake to the sound of a babbling brook or the fresh smell of dewy trees and grass taking in the morning sun. But we were also not in Moscow. One of the neighbors apparently also kept chickens, because in the early mornings we were roused by the sounds of a rooster. The first time it happened, I found Yulia already lying awake, smiling. “My dear,” she said, “we’re not in Moscow anymore.” This was a quote from an old Soviet anecdote about an American family that comes to the Soviet Union on a trip from Chicago, and whose young daughter keeps complaining about the accommodations, to which her parents reply, “My dear, we’re not in Chicago anymore.” But also it was true. We were not in Moscow anymore. And that meant we were on vacation.

Nikolai had set up the house with wi-fi so in the mornings Yulia and I were able to work. (I had taken on three summer PMOOCs; the U.S. economy was still in recession but partly for that reason there was less of a PMOOC drop-off than expected.) Then in the afternoons we would go for a walk to the abandoned quarry. My grandmother wasn’t up for these walks but she remained content to sit in the backyard wearing her old wide-brimmed summer hat and occasionally getting up to feed herself raspberries from the seemingly inexhaustible raspberry bush. One morning Yulia and I woke up and stumbled into the kitchen and my grandmother was already out in the yard, picking raspberries. She had in recent weeks become almost entirely reliant on her cane when she walked, but now she was stretched out to her full height, reaching for raspberries. Yulia said, “She looks like a little bear.”

I had brought along a whole packet of old Soviet movies on DVD from the DVD pirate kiosk at Clean Ponds, and in the evenings we would watch them together. We watched Office Romance, about a mean lady boss and her nerdy but charming underling, who fall in love; and Five Evenings, a Nikita Mikhalkov film about a man who returns suddenly from unknown parts to spend a week (five evenings) with his old love and her teenage nephew, whose mother died during the war. Though the film was from the 1970s, the director, Mikhalkov, was still alive and active and had become a nasty nationalist, and so Yulia refused to watch it with us and went upstairs. But my grandmother and I were free of such prejudices, and we were not disappointed. The movie centers on the man’s attempts to win back his old love by exerting a manly influence on her rebellious teenager. The film is set in the mid-1950s, and it’s unclear why the man, Sasha, has been away—whether he was imprisoned, or he simply left, or what. His old girlfriend Tamara is wary of him but not actively hostile, whereas the boy rejects him outright. By the end of the film, Sasha has broken down the boy’s resistance somewhat, and the three of them spend some time together. Still, it is a grim and unrelenting film. In the last scene, Tamara drops her hostility toward Sasha and allows him to fall asleep with his head resting on her lap. We finally learn—it’s possible that to the Soviet audience of its time this would have been obvious from the start—the reason the couple was separated: the war flung them to different parts of the empire, and Sasha has only now managed to make it back. And as he falls asleep on her lap, Tamara, beginning to plan her future with him again, pronounces a kind of prayer. “Just don’t let there be another war,” she says. “Just don’t let there be another war.”