Keith Gessen - A Terrible Country

Moscow’s subway, also built by Stalin, was justly famous. In the center of the city the stations were glorious, laid out in marble, decorated in colorful mosaics depicting the heroic achievements of the working class. Some still featured giant statues of Lenin or Marx or Red Army soldiers fighting off the Nazis. The stations were spotless, and even in the stuffy final days of August they were always cool. Trains came quickly and efficiently, and a digital clock at the entrance to the tunnel in each station indicated to the second the time that had passed since the last train departed. By the time the clock reached two minutes and thirty seconds, another train had usually arrived.

But riding this famous metro with my grandmother, I quickly came to see its limitations. It was incredibly crowded: because all the lines but one were radial, that is, running from the center of the circle that was Moscow to its outskirts, there was no way to transfer from one line to another without going through the center, meaning that basically all travelers were routed through a few stations near the Kremlin, which is where we lived. Every time we got on a train, it was packed. And packed here meant something different from what it did in New York. In New York during rush hour the trains could be so crowded that people couldn’t get on, and had to wait for the next train. In Moscow when this happened, people got on anyway.

The trains themselves were OK, but, unlike the station platforms, hot and stuffy, filled with the body odor of a hundred Russian men. And finally and worst of all, there were simply not enough stops. No matter where you arrived, you still had some walking to do.

We tried to head out to Sokolniki Park, just a few metro stops away, while the weather was still nice. But the subway ride and the walk to the park tired my grandmother out. The sway of the fast trains made her nauseous. The jostling and bumping upset her. “Let’s go home,” she said, just about as soon as we emerged from the metro.

“We just got here,” I said. “Let’s at least make it to the park.”

“I’m telling you I want to go home!”

I stopped. She was holding on to my arm and stopped as well. We were just outside the Sokolniki metro, with people going in and out of the heavy swinging doors. My grandmother was so small. She had put on her little light-blue sun hat for our trip, and her light-green summer pants. “Whatever you want,” I said, though I was upset.

“Fine,” my poor tired grandmother said at last. “Let’s just go to the park and then go back.”

We walked to the park and sat for a while on a bench just inside it. Then we headed home again. Neither of us had found the trip much fun. I knew that I was to blame for not coming up with something better. But I didn’t know what that could be.

My grandmother had once been devoted to cinema, taking the train in from Dubna on weekends to see whatever was playing at the House of Cinema near Mayakovskaya—she received hard-to-find passes from a man she’d once dated, before she met Uncle Lev. She liked to complain to whoever would listen that the movies at the Dubna House of Culture were always six months out of date. Now she told me she could no longer stand the movies. “It’s just bakh-bakh-bakh ,” she said, miming a gun with her hand. “I can’t watch.” She had a paper with entertainment listings that she still bought, out of habit, every single week from a newsstand next to the Azeri chicken guys, and one morning she handed it to me. “Andryush,” she said, “can you find something for us to see?” She had marked up the film section with checks and circles and crosses, but I got the sense that she was doing this at random. The trouble was, I didn’t know any better than she did. I took the paper to the Coffee Grind so I could use the internet to puzzle out which movies it was referring to, since most of them were American or British, and I didn’t recognize the titles in translation. Once I’d puzzled them out, I saw the problem: almost all the foreign movies playing in Moscow (and since the collapse of the Russian film industry in the early 1990s, almost all the movies playing in Moscow were foreign) were shit. It was Kung Fu Panda , The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor , and Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa . No offense intended, but many of these movies were cartoons; the rest were bakh-bakh-bakh, just as my grandmother said. In the end, to avoid the bakh-bakh-bakh, I found us an artsy Danish film that was showing at what seemed from its website to be a quasi-underground film place not far from our house. The address for the cinema was Red Army Avenue, 24, which I naïvely thought would mean it was on Red Army Avenue; it turned out the cinema was in an inner courtyard off Red Army Avenue. While we were searching for it, it started to rain; my grandmother pleaded for us to give up, but I insisted I could find it, left her under an awning, and ran around for five minutes until I did. I came back to fetch my tired and slightly wet grandmother and dragged her to the theater. Inside were several dozen young Moscow hipsters, wearing Converse. My people! They would think I was pretty cool for bringing my grandmother. Except that they did not. She got hushed twice for asking me what was happening in the film. The hipsters looked annoyed when we went past them halfway through so my grandmother could use the bathroom. At the end of the film, she asked me what I thought, and I sort of shrugged, not wanting to get into it. She then declared very loudly, “It was so boring!” A few of the hipsters shot us dirty looks. But she was right. The movie was boring. After that I put our film viewing on hold.

My grandmother’s problem was not that she couldn’t handle the tasks life still put before her. She could handle them. Her problem was loneliness. “The thing is,” she would say to me during our walks, or over lunch, or over breakfast, “all my friends have died. Everyone close to me has died. Borya Kraisenstern died. Lyubima Gershkovich died. Rosa Pipkin died. Look,” she said, picking up her phone books, “these are just lists of the dead now. Just dead, dead, dead.” Occasionally I would try to argue (What about Dima? What about me?), but in its broad outlines it was true. Her lone remaining friend was Emma Abramovna, with whom she talked on the phone quite frequently, but since Emma Abramovna’s dacha lacked a landline, their conversations consisted primarily of my grandmother saying, “What? I didn’t hear that!” They would have this conversation multiple times a day. Once in a while I would hear my grandmother bringing up the dacha. “How is Peredelkino?” she would say. “Is it nice there?” Hearing an answer in the affirmative, she would say sadly, “Here in the city it’s so stuffy. I can hardly breathe.”

Unable to travel to the park, worried about seeing another bad movie, we contented ourselves with walking along the little green pedestrian mall in between the traffic lanes of the boulevard. Our stretch of it went from the statue of Lenin’s widow, Nadezhda Krupskaya, to the giant scary RussOil building across from Clean Ponds. We walked back and forth between these, arguing. My grandmother argued that she was neglected and abandoned, that Dima didn’t love her, and that I wasn’t going to stay very long. I argued that Dima was busy, that she was not abandoned, and that I would stay as long as necessary. I thought it was important to correct the things she was mistaken about, or even to challenge the things she was right about, just to keep the grooves of her memory working. This was often frustrating, as she didn’t seem to believe me, and only sometimes because I was lying.

Once in a while I tried to jog her memory about Soviet history—Stalinism, the purges, the war, the “thaw”—but I never got anywhere. She didn’t remember, and she didn’t seem to want to try. Someone more committed to getting at the truth might have forced her to remember whether she wanted to or not. I don’t know. But I couldn’t do it.