Keith Gessen - A Terrible Country

He got on the phone and soon we had six guys from the hockey game, including Fedya and Grisha from the white team, sitting in the diner with us. Anton and I saw each of them pull up in their Mercedeses and BMWs and park quasi-legally within a convenient distance of the diner. Watching their sleek black cars slowly maneuver into place—“That’s Tolya,” Anton said. “That’s Fedya”—and then watching them enter the diner, in their weekend sweat suits, and all of them bigger than I remembered them, I took a momentary pride in how far I’d come in the past year. That I could convene such a meeting was amazing to me; at the same time, it was also being convened because I had managed to land our goalie in jail. Each of the guys came in, shook hands with everyone around the table, ordered food, and only then heard out Anton and me. Then each of them got on the phone to people they knew. Grisha called his friends in management at RussOil. Fedya and Vanya both had connections in law enforcement. Tolya called some of his banker friends, just in case. Mostly people came up with nothing, but Grisha and Fedya talked to people who were in the know.

“This is coming from pretty high up,” Grisha reported. “They’re still pissed about the bulldozer in the forest. It’s over my head. I told them we needed a goalie. They said we should visit one of the sports schools.”

“What’d you say?”

“I hung up.”

“Fuck,” said Anton.

The guys sat for a while longer, trying to think of people to contact, but it was clear that this was their best shot at it, and that once they left the diner, that was it.

“There’s no one we know who knows someone who could take care of this?” I said.

“Andrei, I talked to the assistant to the chairman of the company,” Grisha said. “He said the boss has taken a personal interest and wants these guys in jail. That’s the very highest level—it’s way beyond us.”

He took a bite of his burger.

“He also said they’re looking to make more arrests. He said there was some girl involved.”

Oh shit, I thought. Oh no. “Grish,” I said, “listen, that’s Yulia. Remember, she came to one of the games?” Yulia had come to one of the skates and watched from the bleachers; the guys had all been very polite to her. “Can you call your friend back? If Yulia gets arrested, tell him I’m going to the embassy.”

I didn’t know what I would do if I went to the embassy, but it sounded like the thing to say. Grisha looked thoughtful for a moment and then picked up his phone again—most of the guys still had regular old mobile phones, and Grisha’s looked tiny in his massive hand.

“Sash, listen,” he said. “That girl you mentioned—that’s the American’s girl. They’re planning on getting married. I think if they pick her up the American’s going to raise hell. It’s going to be a huge pain in the ass… Yeah… I understand. Just keep it in mind.”

Grisha hung up and gave me a look that said, “I did what I could. We’ll see what happens.”

After that, in a subdued and somewhat defeated manner, everyone finished their burgers and, shaking hands all around, took off. Anton and I remained with a heap of uneaten French fries.

I went outside—I had not developed the Russian habit of holding phone conversations right in front of other people—and called Boris again to tell him that more arrests might be in the offing. “OK,” he said and hung up. I later learned that he took the next train to Kiev. I was unable to reach Nikolai, but he later told me that after hearing about the arrests he’d gone to his dacha for a day, just as he’d once imagined, and then taken a train to Estonia. After trying and failing again to call Yulia I sent her a text warning that more arrests might be coming.

She wrote back this time. “I’m not going anywhere,” she said.

I was elated to hear from her, but it was nothing she hadn’t said to me a dozen times. And when I tried calling her again she did not pick up. I went back inside the diner to join Anton.

“Andrei,” he said, “don’t take it into your head. It’s not your fault. Sergei knew what he was doing.”

“Thank you,” I said. And I was thankful. But it didn’t change the fact that this was all my fault.

That evening, I got a call from Phil Nelson. We’d spoken very briefly once or twice during my time at the university, but he greeted me like an old friend. He said he’d always been very impressed with my work and that he loved my Slavic Review article (which he could not possibly have seen), and then just as my adviser had predicted he offered me a job. He had been thinking for a while, he said, that the university needed to start thinking systematically about the historical experience of the Gulag, both in Soviet Russia and other places, and given my research interests, as well as my recent brush with Russian totalitarianism, how would I like to be the inaugural chair of Gulag Studies at our great university?

I had expected the call, though not in all its crazy details, and I had hoped my instinct would be to say no. But it wasn’t. My instinct was to say yes. I tried to put it off. “I’ve got a lot of stuff,” I said meekly, “a lot of projects, under way here right now.”

“Sure, of course!” said Nelson. “I think we could do a fifteen-thousand-dollar research budget to help you get back and forth a bit. Would that work?”

Jesus, would it work. I could fly back every other week, practically.

I was trying to formulate some response to this, but Nelson must have mistaken my silence for toughness, because he said, “And look, now that we’re talking numbers, how would one hundred be to start? That’s not including health insurance and other benefits.”

I was speechless. Most people I knew made sixty-five or seventy. But he wasn’t done.

“And look, I know it’s tough to find a place in New York when you’re in Moscow, so let me see if we can come up with some housing for you. It might be in the new construction, but you’ll still be able to walk to campus.” The university had recently completed some new buildings in the East Village. He was offering me housing and I didn’t even have to ask for it. I gave a small laugh of disbelief, which I think Nelson understood correctly to be a surrender.

He decided not to press his advantage. “So how about this,” he said. “Take a day, walk around the block a couple of times and noodle it over, and we’ll talk again tomorrow, all right? I think we can come to terms.”

And he hung up. The next day he called again, confirming his offer of a one-bedroom apartment in the new building near Astor Place. After everything I’d said and thought about the inequities of the academic job market; after all the progress I’d made here on starting a new life; after all my promises of how I’d never leave my grandmother behind; after all that, and much more, when it finally came time for me to act on my supposed convictions, I did not. I took the job and the research funding and the apartment.

Having done so, I did not have to sell my grandmother’s apartment. I now had a salary and could contribute to paying for a caretaker, as I’d said I would. For all his bluster, Dima wouldn’t actually have sold it without me. But I no longer had a moral leg to stand on. Dima had to leave our grandmother because they were readying a case against him. Whereas I left of my own free will. Who was I to tell Dima he couldn’t sell if he needed the money? Here, as in other things, I took the easy way out. I wrote my brother from the windowsill: “I’m ready to sell.”

It took all of twenty seconds for him to write me back. “Finally!!!!” he said.

And that was that. Miklos came by the next day and offered two eighty. We accepted. I asked Seraphima Mikhailovna if, once we found a new place, she’d be willing to come live with our grandmother. She said yes.