Keith Gessen - A Terrible Country

At this point I saw Grisha, the bald, violent defenseman from the white team, walking past me with another guy, both of them in suits. I knew Grisha worked in oil, but I didn’t know which company. He saw that I was looking at him and he looked back, and then his face took on a look of surprise. “Andryush?” he said. He was smiling. He came up to me and shook my hand. “What are you doing?” he said.

“I’m protesting.”

“You’re protesting us?”

“Yes. RussOil framed a union leader out in Tyumen’ and we’re trying to bring attention to the matter.”

“Yeah, I heard about that.” He shook his head and chuckled. “Did someone pay you to do this?”

“No. We’ve been following this story for a while. Sergei’s down there.” I pointed to him.

“Holy shit!” He laughed. “What are you, a communist?”

“Not quite. But close.”

“All right then. I never knew. Are you coming to hockey tonight?”

“I wouldn’t miss it.”

“Ha!” he said, and shook my hand again. “I’ll see you there, international agent.”

And with that he rejoined his friend and kept walking toward the RussOil building.

To the left of me, Misha was looking over, as if to say, “What was that?”

“I know him from hockey!” I said, and almost as soon as the words were out of my mouth, two policemen had grabbed me by the elbows.

“Come with us,” they said.

“OK,” I said. I did not try to fight them. “What happened?”

“You talked to your friend over there. That makes this a public meeting.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Do we look like we’re kidding?” They walked me toward a small police jeep and pushed me up into the tiny back compartment, where there was a wooden bench. They slammed the door behind me and aside from a few breathing holes in the roof through which sunlight entered, I was completely in the dark.

I leaned back on the bench and considered my situation. Just a few minutes ago I was on the street, free to do whatever I pleased, and suddenly I was trapped in this jeep. It was four o’clock. Unless they let me go right away I was going to miss dinner, but hockey wasn’t until nine, so I might still make that. If they held me very long I’d need to call my grandmother and lie to her about why I was going to be late. Those were the sorts of things I was thinking about.

Outside I heard Sergei arguing with the police. “He’s an American citizen,” he said. “You want to pick up an American citizen for protesting against RussOil? It’s going to be in all the papers.”

“I don’t care if he’s a citizen of Portugal!” said one of the policemen. “We have the law and we follow the law.”

“Whatever you want,” said Sergei. “For now it’s still your country.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“We’ll see,” said Sergei.

He came up to the jeep and knocked on my door with the palm of his hand. “Andrei, it’s Sergei. How are you doing in there?”

“OK!” I said.

“Listen,” said Sergei. “They’ll take you to the station and have you sit for a while and try to scare you. But you’ll be out fast and then we can all get a drink, OK?”

“Yes,” I said.

Now I heard Yulia. “Andryushik,” she said. Her voice was coming from next to Sergei’s. “Are you OK?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Don’t let them scare you,” she said. “We’re going to raise a fuss and they’ll let you out soon.”

“OK,” I said. “Will you call my grandmother and tell her we’ll be late for dinner?”

“Of course.”

“Let’s go!” I heard someone say, and then two doors opened and shut up front, and the jeep’s engine started, and we began to move. They drove fast and I bounced around in back a little, but before I even figured out how best to sit so as not to get jostled against the back door, we had stopped and I heard the officers opening their doors. Then they opened mine. The first thing I saw was the Hugo Boss. I thought I must be hallucinating, and then realized they had simply taken me to the station on Sretenka. I was two minutes away from my house.

I’ve gone over in my mind what happened next a fair amount, though maybe not as much as I should. It’s hard to tell whether what I said to the police had any bearing on what happened later to Sergei and the others, but I can’t help but feel like it did. And does.

For a moment I thought they were just going to let me go, having put a little scare in me, but instead the two officers who’d arrested me, one a blue-eyed Slav, the other with a more Asiatic look, both of them in their midtwenties, flanked me and walked me up the stairs into the station house. I had been here that one time I lost my grandmother, and I half hoped I’d recognize the duty officer behind the desk, but it was a different guy and in any case it’s unlikely he would have remembered me. The new guy buzzed us through the turnstile into the station, and then there was a waiting room with some benches. We stopped there and at this point the Slavic officer asked me for my phone and my “documents.”

I had brought my passport with me, in case this very thing happened, and I now took it out and handed it over. Months earlier I had purchased a little leather passport case for it, so that it wouldn’t get totally destroyed from sitting in my pocket as much as it did, and therefore the first thing the cop saw was the ordinary black passport cover with the word “Russia” on it. He hadn’t been there, apparently, when Sergei urged one of the officers to let me go because I was American, and it was only when he opened the passport that he realized I wasn’t Russian. He kept his poker face momentarily and then broke down. “American?” he said incredulously and with, I thought, some anger.

“Yes.”

“Well, fuck your mother.” He turned to his partner, who had ducked into a nearby door and was returning with some paper forms in his hand. “Marat, this guy’s a fucking spy.”

“We caught a spy?” Marat said curiously.

“I think we did, Marat.” The cop gave me a hard stare and, tucking my passport and phone into his front shirt pocket, led me by the elbow to another waiting room adjacent to this one. This one had a guy in it, definitely the worse for wear, sitting on a bench with his elbows tucked into his knees, like he had a stomachache.

“Stay here,” said the cop, and pushed me toward a bench across from the guy.

I soon saw that the guy was just very drunk. He wore filthy jeans and a button-down shirt and his face was red from being outdoors all the time. He started looking me up and down, and I wondered if this was the moment when I found out if I had the mettle to last in prison. But my cellmate did not make an aggressive move. Instead he said, “So they got you too, huh?”

I nodded.

“Fuckers,” he said loudly. “Bloodsuckers!” he yelled.

Holy shit, I thought, it’s the dumpster guy. But no one responded, and he went back into his cocoon. We sat there awhile longer, though the door to the room—it was just an ordinary wooden door, like in any other Russian institution—opened a few times. First, two beefy, short, middle-aged men in black jeans and button-down shirts opened it and stood in the doorway. They looked at me for a while and then one of them said, with unconcealed aggression, “International agent, huh?”

I was taken aback. “No,” I said, smiling, thinking he might have been kidding.

He wasn’t kidding, and he soon slammed the door. These two were followed by slightly younger, taller, thinner men, in street clothes that were more expensive and better shoes. They opened the door, gave me a quick look, and then nodded politely. They looked oddly familiar. After they left I spent a few minutes trying to figure out where I knew them from—TV? Hockey? The neighborhood?—until I figured it out. The Coffee Grind! I’d seen them in the Coffee Grind. They were FSB officers. It made sense. The older guys were police detectives; the second pair were from the FSB.