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- Herausgeber: Fitzcarraldo Editions
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
In the summer of 2008, Andrei Kaplan moves from New York to Moscow to look after his ageing grandmother, a woman who survived the dark days of communism and witnessed Russia's violent capitalist transformation. She welcomes Andrei into her home, even if she can't always remember who he is. Andrei learns to navigate Putin's Moscow, still the city of his birth, but with more expensive coffee. He looks after his elderly – but surprisingly sharp! – grandmother, finds a place to play hockey, a café to send emails, and eventually some friends, including a beautiful young activist named Yulia. Capturing with a miniaturist's brush the unfolding demands of family, fortune, personal ambition, ideology, and desire, A Terrible Country is a compelling novel about ageing, radical politics, Russia at a crossroads, and the difficulty – or impossibility – of actually changing one's life.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018
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“A cause for celebration: big-hearted, witty, warm, compulsively readable, earnest, funny, full of that kind of joyful sadness I associate with Russia and its writers. Gessen’s particular gift is his ability to effortlessly and charmingly engage with big ideas—power, responsibility, despotism of various stripes, the question of what a country is supposed to do for the people who live in it—while still managing to tell a moving and entertaining human story. At a time when people are wondering whether art can rise to the current confusing political moment, this novel is a reassurance, from a wonderful and important writer.”
— George Saunders, author of Lincoln in the Bardo
“A Terrible Country is even better than I hoped. By turns sad, funny, bewildering, revelatory, and then sad again, it recreates the historical-psychological experience of returning, for twenty-first-century reasons, to a country one’s parents left in the twentieth century. It’s at once an old-fashioned novel about the interplay between generational roles, family fates, and political ideology, and a kind of global detective mystery about neo-liberalism (plus a secret map of Moscow in terms of pickup hockey). Gessen is a master journalist and essayist, as well as a storyteller with a scary grasp on the human heartstrings, and A Terrible Country unites the personal and political as only the best novels do.”
— Elif Batuman, author of The Idiot
“Like Primo Levi’s masterpiece If Not Now, When?, A Terrible Country makes the emotional case for an unfamiliar politics. Its critique of the Russian mafia state is balanced by a deeply humanistic attention to common decency. I would not hesitate to recommend this novel to a busy person who otherwise refuses to touch fiction. The only up-to-the-minute, topical, relevant, and necessary novel of 2018 that never has to mention Trump.”
— Nell Zink, author of The Wallcreeper
A TERRIBLE COUNTRY
KEITH GESSEN
For Rosalia Moiseevna Solodovnik, 1920–2015
CONTENTS
PART I
I.
I MOVE TO MOSCOW
In the late summer of 2008, I moved to Moscow to take care of my grandmother. She was about to turn ninety and I hadn’t seen her for nearly a decade. My brother Dima and I were her only family; her lone daughter, our mother, had died years earlier. Baba Seva lived alone now in her old Moscow apartment. When I called to tell her I was coming, she sounded very happy to hear it, and also a little confused.
My parents and my brother and I left the Soviet Union in 1981. I was six and Dima was sixteen, and that made all the difference. I became an American, whereas Dima remained essentially Russian. As soon as the Soviet Union collapsed, he returned to Moscow to make his fortune. Since then he had made and lost several fortunes; where things stood now I wasn’t sure. But one day he Gchatted me to ask if I could come to Moscow and stay with Baba Seva while he went to London for an unspecified period of time.
“Why do you need to go to London?”
“I’ll explain when I see you.”
“You want me to drop everything and travel halfway across the world and you can’t even tell me why?”
There was something petulant that came out of me when dealing with my older brother. I hated it, and couldn’t help myself.
Dima said, “If you don’t want to come, say so. But I’m not discussing this on Gchat.”
“You know,” I said, “there’s a way to take it off the record. No one will be able to see it.”
“Don’t be an idiot.”
He meant to say that he was involved with some very serious people, who would not so easily be deterred from reading his Gchats. Maybe that was true, maybe it wasn’t. With Dima the line between those concepts was always shifting.
As for me, I wasn’t really an idiot. But neither was I not an idiot. I had spent four long years of college and then eight much longer years of grad school studying Russian literature and history, drinking beer, and winning the Grad Student Cup hockey tournament (five times!); then I had gone out onto the job market for three straight years, with zero results. By the time Dima wrote me I had exhausted all the available post-graduate fellowships and had signed up to teach online sections in the university’s new PMOOC initiative, short for “paid massive online open course,” although the “paid” part mostly referred to the students, who really did need to pay, and less to the instructors, who were paid very little. It was definitely not enough to continue living, even very frugally, in New York. In short, on the question of whether I was an idiot, there was evidence on both sides.
Dima writing me when he did was, on the one hand, providential. On the other hand, Dima had a way of getting people involved in undertakings that were not in their best interests. He had once convinced his now former best friend Tom to move to Moscow to open a bakery. Unfortunately, Tom opened his bakery too close to another bakery, and was lucky to leave Moscow with just a dislocated shoulder. Anyway, I proceeded cautiously. I said, “Can I stay at your place?” Back in 1999, after the Russian economic collapse, Dima bought the apartment directly across the landing from my grandmother’s, so helping her out from there would be easy.
“I’m subletting it,” said Dima. “But you can stay in our bedroom in Grandma’s place. It’s pretty clean.
“I’m thirty-three years old,” I said, meaning too old to live with my grandmother.
“You want to rent your own place, be my guest. But it’ll have to be pretty close to Grandma’s.”
Our grandmother lived in the center of Moscow. The rents there were almost as high as Manhattan’s. On my PMOOC salary I would be able to rent approximately an armchair.
“Can I use your car?”
“I sold it.”
“Dude. How long are you leaving for?”
“I don’t know,” said Dima. “And I already left.”
“Oh,” I said. He was already in London. He must have left in a hurry.
But I in turn was desperate to leave New York. The last of my old classmates from the Slavic department had recently left for a new job, in California, and my girlfriend of six months, Sarah, had recently dumped me at a Starbucks. “I just don’t see where this is going,” she had said, meaning I suppose our relationship, but suggesting in fact my entire life. And she was right: even the thing that I had once most enjoyed doing—reading and writing about and teaching Russian literature and history—was no longer any fun. I was heading into a future of halfheartedly grading the half-written papers of half-interested students, with no end in sight.
Whereas Moscow was a special place for me. It was the city where my parents had grown up, where they had met; it was the city where I was born. It was a big, ugly, dangerous city, but also the cradle of Russian civilization. Even when Peter the Great abandoned it for St. Petersburg in 1713, even when Napoleon sacked it in 1812, Moscow remained, as Alexander Herzen put it, the capital of the Russian people. “They recognized their ties of blood to Moscow by the pain they felt at losing it.” Yes. And I hadn’t been there in years. Over the course of a few grad-school summers I’d grown tired of its poverty and hopelessness. The aggressive drunks on the subway; the thugs in tracksuits and leather jackets walking around eyeing everyone; the guy eating from the dumpster next to my grandmother’s place every night during the summer I spent there in 2000, periodically yelling “Fuckers! Bloodsuckers!” then going back to eating. I hadn’t been back since.
Still, I kept my hands off the keyboard. I needed some kind of concession from Dima, if only for my pride.
I said, “Is there someplace for me to play hockey?” As my academic career had declined, my hockey playing had ramped up. Even during the summer, I was on the ice three days a week.
“Are you kidding?” said Dima. “Moscow is a hockey mecca. They’re building new rinks all the time. I’ll get you into a game as soon as you get here.”
I took that in.
“Oh, and the wireless signal from my place reaches across the landing,” Dima said. “Free wi-fi.”
“OK!” I wrote.
“OK?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Why not.”
A few days later I went to the Russian consulate on the Upper East Side, stood in line for an hour with my application, and got a one-year visa. Then I wrapped things up in New York: I sublet my room to a rock drummer from Minnesota, returned my books to the library, and fetched my hockey stuff from a locker at the rink. It was all a big hassle, and not cheap, but I spent the whole time imagining the different life I would soon be living and the different person I’d become. I pictured myself carrying groceries for my grandmother; taking her on excursions around the city, including to the movies (she’d always loved the movies); walking with her arm in arm around the old neighborhood and listening to her tales of life under socialism. There was so much about her life that I didn’t know, about which I’d never asked. I had been incurious and oblivious; I had believed more in books than I had in people. I pictured myself protesting the Putin regime in the morning, playing hockey in the afternoon, and keeping my grandmother company in the evening. Perhaps there was even some way I might use my grandmother’s life as the basis for a journal article. I pictured myself sitting monastically in my room and with my grandmother’s stories in hand adding a whole new dimension to my work. Maybe I could put her testimony in italics and intersperse it throughout my article, like in In Our Time.
On my last night in town my roommates threw me a small party. “To Moscow,” they said, raising their cans of beer.
“To Moscow!” I repeated.
“And don’t get killed,” one of them added.
“I won’t get killed,” I promised. I was excited. And drunk. It occurred to me that there was a certain glamor that might attend spending time in an increasingly violent and dictatorial Russia, whose armed forces had just pummeled the small country of Georgia into a humiliating defeat. At three in the morning I sent a text message to Sarah. “I’m leaving tomorrow,” it said, as if I were heading for a very dangerous place. Sarah did not respond. Three hours later I woke up, still drunk, threw the last of my stuff into my huge red suitcase, grabbed my hockey stick, and headed for JFK. I got on my flight and promptly fell asleep.
Next thing I knew I was standing in the passport control line in the grim basement of Sheremetevo-2 International Airport. It never seemed to change. As long as I’d been flying in here, they made you come down to this basement and wait in line before you got your bags. It was like a purgatory from which you suspected you might be entering someplace other than heaven.
But the Russians looked different than I remembered them. They were well dressed, with good haircuts, and talking on sleek new cell phones. Even the guards in their light-blue short-sleeve uniforms looked cheerful. Though the line was long, several stood off together to the side, laughing. Oil was selling at $114 a barrel, and they had clobbered the Georgians—is that what they were laughing about?
Modernization theory said the following: Wealth and technology are more powerful than culture. Give people nice cars, color televisions, and the ability to travel to Europe, and they’ll stop being so aggressive. No two countries with McDonald’s franchises will ever go to war with each other. People with cell phones are nicer than people without cell phones.
I wasn’t so sure. The Georgians had McDonald’s, and the Russians bombed them anyway. As I neared the passport booth, a tall, bespectacled, nicely dressed European, Dutch or German, asked in English if he could cut the line: he had to catch a connecting flight. I nodded yes—we’d have to wait for our luggage anyway—but the man behind me, about the same height as the Dutch guy but much sturdier, in a boxy but not to my eyes inexpensive suit, piped up in Russian-accented English.
“Go back to end of line.”
“I’m about to miss my flight,” said the Dutchman.
“Go back to end of line.”
I said to him in Russian, “What’s the difference?”
“There’s a big difference,” he answered.
“Please?” the Dutchman asked again, in English.
“I said go back. Now.” The Russian turned slightly so that he was square with the Dutchman. The latter man kicked his bag in frustration. Then he picked it up and walked to the back of the line.
“He made the correct decision,” said the Russian guy to me, in Russian, indicating that as a man of principle he was ready to pummel the Dutch guy for cutting the line.
I didn’t answer. A few minutes later, I approached the passport control booth. The young, blond, unsmiling border guard sat in his uniform bathed in light, like a god. I had no rights here, I suddenly remembered; there was no such thing here as rights. I wondered as I handed over my passport whether I had finally pressed my luck, returning to the country my parents had fled, too many times. Would they finally take me into custody for all the unkind things I had thought about Russia over the years?
But the guard merely took my battered blue American passport—the passport of a person who lived in a country where you didn’t have to carry your passport everywhere you went, where in fact you might not even know where your passport was for months and years at a time—with mild disgust. If he had a passport like mine he’d take better care of it. He checked my name against the terrorist database and buzzed me through the gate to the other side.
That was it. I was in Russia again. My grandmother Seva lived in the very center of the city, in an apartment she’d been awarded, in the late 1940s, by Joseph Stalin. My brother, Dima, brought this up sometimes, when he was trying to make a point, and so did my grandmother, when she was in a self-deprecating mood. “My Stalin apartment,” she called it, as if to remind everyone, and herself, of the moral compromise she had made. Still, in general in our family it was understood that if someone was offering you an apartment, and you lived at the time in a drafty room in a communal apartment with your small daughter, your two brothers, and your mom, then you should take the apartment, no matter who it was from. And it’s not like Stalin himself was handing her the keys or asking for anything in return. She was at the time a young professor of history at Moscow State University, and had consulted on a film about Ivan the Great, the fifteenth-century “gatherer of the lands of Rus” and grandfather to Ivan the Terrible, which Stalin so enjoyed that he declared everyone involved should get an apartment. So in addition to “my Stalin apartment,” my grandmother also called it “my Ivan the Great apartment,” and then, if she was speaking honestly, “my Yolka apartment,” after her daughter, my mother, for whom she had been willing to do anything at all.
To get to this apartment I exchanged some dollars at the booth outside baggage claim—it was about twenty-four rubles per dollar at the time—and took the brand-new express train to Savelovsky Railway Station, passing miles of crumbling Soviet apartment blocks, and the old (also crumbling) turn-of-the-century industrial belt just outside the center. Along the way the massive guy sitting next to me—about my age, in jeans and a short-sleeve button-down—struck up a conversation.
“What model is that?” he asked, about my phone. I had bought a SIM card at the airport and was now putting it in the phone and seeing if it worked.
Here we go, I thought. My phone was a regular T-Mobile flip phone. But I figured this was just a prelude to the guy trying to rob me. I grew tense. My hockey stick was in the luggage rack above us, and anyway it would have been hard to swing it at this guy on this train.
“Just a regular phone,” I said. “Samsung.” I grew up speaking Russian and still speak it with my father and my brother but I have a slight, difficult-to-place accent. I occasionally make small grammatical mistakes or put the stress on the wrong syllable. And I was rusty.
The guy picked up on this, as well as the fact that my olive skin set me apart from most of the Slavs on this fancy train. “Where you from?” he said. He used the familiar ty rather than vy—which could mean he was being friendly, because we were the same age and on the same train, or it could mean he was asserting his right to call me anything he wanted. I couldn’t tell. He began to guess where I might be from. “Spain?” he said. “Or Turkey?”
And what should I answer? If I said “New York” it would mean I had money, even though I was wearing an old pair of jeans, and sneakers that had seen better days, and in fact had no money. A person from New York could get robbed, either on the train or once he got off, in the commotion of the platform. But if I said “Here,” Moscow, it would technically be true but also obviously a lie, which could escalate the situation. And I was on the train from the airport, after all.
“New York,” I said.
The guy nodded sagely. “They have the new iPhone there?”
“Sure,” I said. I wasn’t sure what he was getting at.
“How much does it cost?”
Ah. Western goods in Moscow were always way more expensive than in the West, and Russians always wanted to know just how much more expensive so they could be bitter about it.
I tried to remember. Sarah had had an iPhone. “Two hundred dollars,” I said.
The guy’s eyes widened. He knew it! That was a third of the Russian price.
“But,” I hastened to add, “you have to get a contract. It’s about a hundred dollars a month. For two years. So, not cheap.”
“A contract?” This guy had never heard of a contract. Did I even know what I was talking about? In Russia you just bought a SIM card and paid by the minute.
“Yeah, in America you need a contract.”
The guy was offended. In fact he was beginning to wonder if I wasn’t just making this up. “There must be some way around that,” he said.
“I don’t think so.”
“No,” he said again. “There must be some way to get the phone and dump the contract.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “They’re pretty strict about that stuff.”
The guy shrugged, took out a paper—Kommersant, one of the business dailies—and didn’t say another word to me the rest of the way. A person who couldn’t figure out how to dump an iPhone contract was not worth knowing. But there was no gang of robbers waiting for me at the train station, and from there without further incident I took the metro a couple of stops to Tsvetnoi Boulevard.
The center of Moscow was its own world. Gone were the tall, crumbling apartment blocks of the periphery and the old, crumbling factories. Instead, as I stepped off the long escalator and through the big, heavy, swinging wood doors, I saw a wide street, imposing Stalin-era apartment buildings, some restaurants, and a dozen construction sites in every direction. Tsvetnoi Boulevard was right off the huge Garden Ring road, which ran in a ten-lane loop around the center, at a radius of about a mile and a half from the Kremlin. But as soon as I started up toward Sretenka Street, where my grandmother lived, I found myself on side streets that were quiet and dilapidated, with many of the two-and three-story nineteenth-century buildings unpainted and even, in August, partly abandoned. A group of stray dogs sunning themselves in an abandoned lot on Pechatnikov Lane barked at me and my hockey stick. And then in a few minutes I was home.
My grandmother’s apartment was on the second floor of a five-story white building in a courtyard between two older, shorter buildings, one of them facing Pechatnikov, the other Rozhdestvenskiy Boulevard. The courtyard’s fourth boundary was a big redbrick wall on whose other side was an old church. When I was a kid the courtyard had been filled with trees and dirt for me to play with, and even, during the winter, a tiny hockey rink, but after the USSR fell apart the trees were chopped down and the rink dismantled by neighbors who wanted to park their cars there. The courtyard was also, for a time, a popular destination for local prostitutes; cars would drive into it, run their lights over the merch, and make a selection without even getting out.
I entered that old courtyard now. The prostitutes were long gone, and though it was still basically a parking lot, the cars parked here were much nicer, and there were even a few more trees than last time I visited. I entered the code on the front door—it hadn’t changed in a decade—and lugged my suitcase up the stairs. My grandmother came to the door. She was tiny—she had always been small, but now she was even smaller, and the gray hair on her head was even thinner—and for a moment I was worried she wasn’t expecting me. But then she said, “Andryushik. You’re here.” She seemed to have mixed feelings about it.
I went in.
II.
MY GRANDMOTHER
Baba Seva—Seva Efraimovna Gekhtman, my maternal grandmother—was born in a small town in Ukraine in 1919. Her father was an accountant at a textile factory and her mother was a nurse. She had two brothers, and the entire family moved to Moscow not long after the Revolution.
I knew she had excelled in school and been admitted to Moscow State, the best and oldest Russian university, where she studied history. I knew that at Moscow State, not long after the German invasion, she had met a young law student, my grandfather Boris (really Baruch) Lipkin, and that they had fallen in love and been married. Then he was killed near Vyazma in the second year of the war, just a month after my mother was born. I knew that after the war my grandmother had started lecturing at Moscow State and consulted on the Ivan the Great film and received the apartment and lived there with my mother as well as an elderly relative, Aunt Klava; that the apartment had caused some turmoil in the family, not because of who it came from but because my grandmother refused to let her brother and his wife move in with her, because his wife drank and also because she did not want to displace Aunt Klava; that not long after receiving the apartment she had been forced out at Moscow State at the height of the “anti-cosmopolitan,” i.e., anti-Jewish, campaign, and that she had gotten by as a tutor and translator of other Slavic languages; and that she had remarried in late middle age, to a sweet, forgetful geophysicist whom we called Uncle Lev, and moved with him to the nuclear research town of Dubna, vacating the apartment for my parents, and then eventually my brother, before moving back here again, just a few years before I showed up, because Uncle Lev had died in his sleep.
But there was a lot I didn’t know. I didn’t know what had happened to Aunt Klava; nor what her life had been like after the war; nor whether, before the war, during the purges, she had had any knowledge or sense of what was happening in the country. If not, why not? If so, how did she live with that knowledge? And how did she live in this apartment with that knowledge once that knowledge came?
For the moment, as my grandmother busied herself in the kitchen, I put down my bags in our old bedroom—which, contrary to Dima’s promises, was still filled with his crap—and then took a quick look around. The apartment hadn’t changed: it was a museum of Soviet furniture, arranged in layers from newest to oldest, like an archaeological site. There was my grandmother’s grand old oak wood desk, in the back room, from the forties or fifties, as well as her locked standing shelf, also from that era; and then from my parents’ time in the apartment was most of the furniture: the green foldout couch, the glassed-in hanging shelves, and the tall lacquered standing closet. And of course, in our bedroom, our bunk beds, which my father had built not long before our emigration, and which Dima had not replaced; when he’d lived here he’d taken the back room for himself and used our room for guests. There were even a few childhood toys, mostly little cars, now tucked up among the books, that Dima and I had played with. After that came the modern age: Dima had installed a flat-screen in the back room, as well as an exercise bike in our bedroom that was taking up a lot of space. Most of the books on the shelves were Russian classics in their full Soviet editions—fourteen volumes of Dostoevsky, eleven of Tolstoy, sixteen (!) of Chekhov—though there were also some shelves filled with English-language books on business and deal making that Dima had apparently imported. And there was a linoleum-topped table in the kitchen, circa the year of my birth, at which my grandmother now sat, waiting for me.
For no good reason, I was her favorite. During summers when I was little I often stayed with her and Uncle Lev at their dacha in Sheremetevo (not far from the airport), and I had visited them as much as I could when I lived in Moscow during my college year abroad. In the late nineties, when she was still able to travel, she and Dima and I had taken an annual trip to Europe together. All this added up to just a few months together, total, and yet I was the younger and the favorite child of her only daughter, and this was enough. For her I was still that little boy.
She wanted to feed me. Slowly and deliberately she heated potato soup, kotlety (Russian meatballs), and sliced fried potatoes. She moved around the kitchen at a glacial pace and was unsteady on her feet, but there were many things to hold on to in that old kitchen, and she knew exactly where they were. She couldn’t talk and cook at the same time, and her hearing had deterioriated, so I waited while she finished, and then helped her plate the food. Finally, we sat. She asked me about my life in America. “Where do you live?” “New York.” “What?” “New York.” “Oh. Do you live in a house or an apartment?” “An apartment.” “What?” “An apartment.” “Do you own it?” “I rent it. With some roommates.” “What?” “I share it. It’s like a communal apartment.” “Are you married?” “No.” “No?” “No.” “Do you have kids?” “No.” “No kids?” “No. In America,” I half lied, “people don’t have kids until later.” Satisfied, or partly satisfied, she then asked me how long I intended to stay. “Until Dima comes back,” I said. “What?” she said. “Until Dima comes back,” I said again.
“Andryusha,” she said now. “Do you know my friend Musya?”
“Yes,” I said. Emma Abramovna, or Musya, was her oldest and closest friend.
“She’s a very close friend of mine,” my grandmother explained. “And right now, she’s at her dacha.” Emma Abramovna, a literature professor who had managed to hang on at Moscow State despite the anti-Jewish campaign, had a dacha at Peredelkino, the old writers’ colony. My grandmother had lost her own dacha in the nineties, under circumstances I was never quite clear about.
“I think,” she said now, “that next summer she’s going to invite me to stay with her.”
“Yes? She said that?”
“No,” said my grandmother. “But I hope she does.”
“That sounds good,” I said. In August, Muscovites all leave for their dachas; clearly my grandmother’s inability to leave for her dacha was weighing on her mind.
We had now finished our food and our tea, and my grandmother casually reached into her mouth and took out her teeth. She put them in a little teacup on the table. “I need to rest my gums,” she said toothlessly.
“Of course,” I said. Without her teeth to hold them up my grandmother’s lips collapsed a little, and without her teeth to strike her tongue against she spoke with a slight lisp.
“Tell me,” she said now, in the same exploratory tone as earlier. “Do you know Dima?”
“Of course,” I said. “He’s my brother.”
“Oh.” My grandmother sighed, as if she couldn’t entirely trust someone who knew Dima. “Do you know where he is?”
“He’s in London,” I said.
“He never comes to see me,” said my grandmother.
“That’s not true.”
“No, it is. Once he got me to sign over the apartment, he hasn’t been interested in me at all.”
“Grandma!” I said. “That’s definitely not true.” It was true that a few years earlier Dima had put the apartment in his name—under post-Soviet-style gentrification, little old ladies who owned prime Moscow real estate tended to have all sorts of misfortunes befall them. From a safety perspective it was the right move. But I could see now that from my grandmother’s perspective it looked suspicious.
“What’s not true?” she said.
“It’s not true that he doesn’t have any interest in you. He talks to me about you all the time.”
“Hmm,” said my grandmother, unconvinced. Then she sighed again. She started to get up to try to put away the plates, but I implored her to sit, less in that moment because I wanted to help than because she did everything so slowly. I quickly cleared the table and started doing the dishes. As I was finishing, my grandmother came over and made to ask a question that I could tell she thought might be a little delicate.
“Andryusha,” she said. “You are such a dear person to me. To our whole family. But I can’t remember right now. How did we come to know you?”
I was momentarily speechless.
“I’m your grandson,” I said. There was an element of pleading in my voice.
“What?”
“I’m your grandson.”
“My grandson,” she repeated.
“You had a daughter, do you remember?”
“Yes,” she said uncertainly, and then remembered. “Yes. My little daughter.” She thought a moment longer. “She went to America,” said my grandmother. “She went to America and died.”
“That’s right,” I said. My mother had died of breast cancer in 1992; the first time my grandmother saw her after our emigration was at her funeral.
“And you—” she said now.
“I’m her son.”
My grandmother took this in. “Then why did you come here?” she said.
I didn’t understand.
“This is a terrible country. My Yolka took you to America. Why did you come back?” She seemed angry.
I was again at a loss for words. Why had I come? Because Dima had asked me to. And because I wanted to help my grandmother. And because I thought it would help me find a topic for an article, which would then help me get a job. These reasons swirled through my mind like an argument and I decided to go with the one that seemed most practical. “For work,” I said. “I need to do some research.”
“Oh,” she said. “All right.” She too had had to work in this terrible country, and she could understand.
Momentarily satisfied, my grandmother excused herself and went to her room to lie down.
I remained in the kitchen, drinking another cup of tea. Throughout the apartment were photos of our family, and especially my mother—on walls, on dressers, on bookshelves. In America our family had become scattered; in Moscow it was exactly where it had always been.
Holy shit, I thought. This was not the state in which I had expected to find my grandmother. Dima said she was on medication for her dementia, but I hadn’t really understood.
My first thought was: I am not qualified. I am not qualified to care for an eighty-nine-year-old woman who can’t remember who I am. I was a person who had indulged in an unthinkable amount of schooling and then failed to convert that schooling into an actual job. “I just don’t see where this is going,” Sarah had said at the Starbucks.
“Why does it have to go somewhere?” I said, lamely.
She just shook her head. “I may regret this,” she said. “But I doubt it.” And she was right. I was an idiot, like Dima said. And I was in over my head. That first day, in the kitchen, was the first time, the first of many, that I would decide to leave.
In my mind I began composing an email. “Dima,” it went, “I feel that you misled me about the condition our grandmother is in. Or maybe I misunderstood you. I can’t handle this. I’m sorry. Let’s hire someone who knows what they’re doing. I’ll help pay for it.” And then I’d go back to New York. There’s no shame in knowing your limitations. Though how exactly I’d help pay for it was a mystery. After buying my visa and my ticket, I had less than one thousand dollars to my name.
My grandmother came out of her room and crossed the foyer to the toilet. She had gone to bed, clearly, and then gotten up again: her hair was mussed and she was still without her teeth. Seeing me, she gave a toothless smile and a wave. I felt like she knew who I was in that moment. I calmed down.
So I was to keep her company. Maybe even an idiot could do that. Who cared if she couldn’t remember certain things? Her life had been so wonderful, such a parade of joys, that she should sit around remembering everything about it? She wouldn’t be able to tell me the story of her life for my would-be article, but I’d find something else to write about. And maybe she wouldn’t know who I was all the time. I knew who I was, and I could remind her. I was the youngest son of her daughter, her lone child, my mother, who had gone to America and died. I got up and washed my teacup and headed for my bedroom.
There were banker’s boxes in the corner and the large exercise bike jammed against the lower bunk. I had to climb past it to lie down. Now I was really looking forward to getting online so as to yell at my brother, but when I got out my laptop and tried to catch the signal from next door, it didn’t work. This may not have been Dima’s fault—my computer was old, so old that it didn’t work unless it was plugged into a socket, and there were many wireless protocols that it couldn’t recognize—and yet it was still something else he had misled me about. I considered going next door and seeing if I could adjust the router, but it seemed unbecoming of the rent collector (this was to be one of my tasks) to be stealing the tenants’ wi-fi. They were paying good money for that wi-fi.
I closed my computer and lay back on the bed, the exercise bike looming over me. My grandmother had put out an old towel and some scratchy sheets, and without getting out of bed I managed to put the sheets on. Then I lay there and thought: Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck. And then: OK. OK. Everything was fine. My grandmother was in bad shape, but I could handle it. My sheets were scratchy, but I could buy new ones. And the bedroom was a mess, but that just meant I had something on Dima. Which was good. Trust me. If you didn’t have something on Dima, it meant Dima had something on you.
It was 8:00 p.m. in Moscow, and still light out, but I felt tired, incredibly tired, and quickly, with my clothes still on, fell asleep.
III.
A TOUR OF THE NEIGHBORHOOD
I woke at five in the morning. My window looked onto an alleyway between our building and the Pechatnikov-side building. Since we were on the second floor and it was late August and I had the window open, and since the two stone buildings created a mini echo chamber, I found that I heard distinctly every cough, Russian swearword, door slamming, ignition turning, and radio blaring shitty Russian pop music that took place anywhere in or near the alleyway. All these noises disturbed my sleep, and not just because they were noises. Dima wouldn’t have left town in such a hurry unless he was in danger, I thought, and if Dima was in danger, then it was possible that Dima’s plenipotentiary, his brother and his rent collector, was also in danger. Though probably not. I lay in bed for a while wondering, and then sat up with a realization.
What if my grandmother wasn’t taking her medicine? Dima had been gone for over a month. What if the forgetfulness I witnessed was just a matter of her missing some pills? I went into the kitchen. Moscow is a northern city and during the summer the days start early; the sun was already up. I had seen her take some pills after our supper and put them on the shelf behind her. I retrieved them now and read the labels. One of the bottles was in fact empty. The name of the drug was unfamiliar to me, of course; there was no indication that it was for dementia, nor any indication that it wasn’t.
Dima had sent me a list of Baba Seva’s medicines, along with what they did, but thinking I’d have wi-fi in the apartment I hadn’t printed it out. Again I tried and failed to catch a wireless signal. I would need to find a place with wi-fi, and fast. I went back to my room and retrieved my threadbare towel and headed for the shower.
My grandmother’s bathroom—separate from the toilet, which had its own, much smaller room, just off the front hall—was large for a Soviet bathroom. It’s possible that it had once been part of the kitchen. Along the wall was a ledge that was used for toiletries. I put mine there now.
The first time I’d returned to Russia after we left, I was a college student. I had received a small grant to travel around and study the “post-Soviet condition.” That trip was a shock. I had never encountered such poverty. In Astrakhan, Rostov, Yalta, Odessa, Lviv, but also Moscow itself, and St. Petersburg, what you saw were ruins—ruined buildings, ruined streets, ruined people—as if the country had lost a war.
I was traveling by myself, and every night at the various cheap hostels and dormitories in which I stayed I would take out my toiletries, and every night it was such a relief. The colors were brighter and more attractive than anything I saw around me: my cool slate-gray Gillette Sensor razor (a mere three blades at the time, but a better shave than mankind had yet known); my tall blue Gillette shaving gel; my brilliant red-and-white Old Spice anti-perspirant (that stuff really worked, and no one else in Russia had it, you could tell the minute you walked onto a crowded bus); my bright yellow Gold Bond powder; my little orange Advil caplets. I was walking many miles every day, interviewing people and looking around, and in the summer heat this led to rashes in my crotch and pain in my feet, but the Gold Bond powder made them go away. And Advil! Russians were still using aspirin. The only way they knew to get rid of a bad morning hangover was to start drinking again. Whereas I popped a few smooth pills into my mouth and was as good as new. I felt like James Bond practically, with my little kit of ingenious devices. Now these wonders had arrived in Russia too, though my grandmother didn’t use them.
It was that summer trip to Russia that set me on the course I’d been on ever since. I had just finished my freshman year of college. College had come as a surprise to me, a bad one. I had thought it would basically be like high school, just cooler. Instead it was something completely different: vast, unfriendly, and highly competitive. I had dreamed of playing hockey there, but within minutes of stepping on the ice for the varsity tryout I saw that it was never going to happen—the level of play was way beyond mine. And neither did I excel in my classes. I wanted to master the Western canon, but every time I opened The Faerie Queen, I fell asleep.
Whenever I saw a Russian class in the course listings I read the description and moved on; why study at college something that I could passively imbibe at home? But halfway through my first year, after I finally quit the hockey team (I had made the JV squad, but wasn’t dressing for any games), unsure of what to do with myself and wondering if taking some classes in Russian might not be a bad way to honor my mother, I walked over to the Slavic department. It was on the fourth floor of the gray foreign languages building, and unlike every other place on that campus it was somehow homey. They had managed to Russify it. There was a big samovar in the corner, tea mugs everywhere, old Russian books in their Soviet editions like the ones we had at our house, and an ironic poster of Lenin. My parents would never have hung an ironic poster of Lenin in our house, but Dima had had one in his place in New York. I felt like I had found, for the first time at that large and forbidding institution, a place where I could be at home.
Six months later I got my grant and went to Russia for the summer. It was the first time I’d been there since we’d left. So these were the streets my parents had walked down; these were the people they had lived among. This was our old apartment (I barely remembered it), where Dima was now living. So much made sense that had not made sense until then. I visited my grandmother and Uncle Lev in Dubna; my grandmother was in her mid-seventies then, but she was amazingly active, translating, reading, watching movies, and taking multi-mile hikes through the woods (which contained a massive particle accelerator). I left Moscow and traveled around; people outside Moscow were more honest about their dreams, more direct about what they didn’t know, and more obviously and desperately poor. I remember sitting with a guy in Astrakhan, a large industrial fishing city on the Caspian Sea, now crumbling under the weight of global competition. This man and I met on the train down from Moscow. He was a computer programmer, like my father, but there was no work for computer programmers just then, so to make ends meet he traveled to Moscow to buy cheap clothes from Turkey to bring back and sell at an open-air market in Astrakhan. Now we were drinking beers on the rickety balcony of the tiny apartment he shared with his young wife and baby boy, and at some point he said, “Listen, Andrei, tell me. What’s it like over there?” Meaning, in America. “Is it the same as here, in the end?”
I didn’t know how to answer. It was the same, yes, in a sense—there were humans in America, they lived their lives, fell in love, had children, tried to provide for them. But it was also not the same. The abundance; the sheer ease of life, at least for people like me; the number and choice and quality of the toiletries: it was not the same. My college dorm room, which I shared with one roommate, was bigger and nicer and better built than this computer programmer’s apartment, which he shared with a wife and child. I tried gently but honestly to explain this. “Well,” said my friend, whom I would never see again though we exchanged addresses and promised to keep in touch, “maybe I’ll get over there someday, see for myself.” And in that moment I thought that I, for my part, would like to stay. In Russia, that is. At least mentally, at least intellectually—it was like no place I had ever been before, though in another sense it was exactly like a place that I had been before, that is to say my childhood, my home.
More than a decade later, a decade of Russian books, Russian classes, Russian academic conferences, a meandering dissertation on Russian literature and “modernity” that no publisher ever responded to, I emerged from the shower—it had a detachable showerhead and no place to attach it, so you had to hold it the entire time—and found my grandmother in her pink bathrobe, leaning over and sipping a coffee with great concentration. I scanned the kitchen, hoping to locate a French press or at least a drip coffee machine, but found only a teakettle and a tin can of instant Nescafé. This was disappointing; over the last few years, as the coffee revolution reached Brooklyn, I had become used to drinking some strong fucking coffee. I resolved—my list of such resolutions was growing—to buy a French press and some normal coffee beans at the first coffee store I found.
My grandmother had her radio tuned to Echo of Moscow, the station of the liberal opposition, and was trying to make sense of the news. The Russian army was reluctantly pulling out of Georgia; the Kremlin was claiming that the Georgians had created a refugee crisis; anti-Kremlin critics blamed Moscow for the war. My grandmother’s radio was small, handheld, and battery-powered, and though she had it playing at full volume and was holding it to her ear, she still seemed uncertain as to what it was saying. She perked up when she saw me. “Ah, you’re up!” she said. “Will you have breakfast?”
I said yes, and as I dressed she fried up some eggs on top of a panful of kasha. When I returned to the kitchen someone on Echo was very sarcastically dismissing Russian claims that Georgia had fired first. “It’s like saying, ‘The mosquito bit me. I had to kill him and all his relatives.’ Of course the mosquito bit you! He’s a mosquito.” I had forgotten that tone the Russian oppositionists always took—“aggrieved” wasn’t the right word for it. It was sarcastic, self-righteous, full of disbelief that these idiots were running the country and that even bigger idiots out there supported them. There was one island of decency, said these voices, and you had found it on your radio dial. I mean, I say that now. In fact it could be intoxicating. Echo, the lone voice of opposition to the regime (by this point all the television channels were firmly under state control): they woke up daily to engage in the battle of good versus evil. But of course you couldn’t outright say on the radio that the regime was evil. That would be too much. So they did it with mockery, sarcasm, subversion. It seemed like a pretty good approximation of what Soviet dissidents must have sounded like back in the 1970s—as if the regime wasn’t the only one that found itself a little nostalgic for that time.
So Russia had invaded Georgia. Or Georgia had invaded a part of Georgia called South Ossetia, and the Russians overreacted. And of course any decent person would agree … I turned it off. I wanted to talk to my grandmother about her medications. Though first I wanted to eat my grandmother’s kasha. It was perfect kasha. I had gone through a period not so long ago of trying to make it, but it always came out mushy.
“Andryush, tell me,” said my grandmother now as she watched me eat. “Where do you live?”
“New York.”
“Where?”
“New York!”
“Oh, New York. Do you live in a house, or an apartment?”
“An apartment.”
“What?”
“An apartment!”
Yesterday she had been wearing a hearing aid, but her hearing now was no worse and no better.
“Do you own the apartment, or do you rent?”
“Rent!” I said very loudly.
“You don’t have to yell,” she said.
“OK.”
“Are you married?”
“No.”
“No?”
“No.”
“Do you have kids?”
“No.”
“No kids?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t have anyone to have them with.”
“Yes,” my grandmother agreed, “that’s true. You need to get married.”
“Grandmother,” I said. “Can I ask you something? I want to help you keep track of your medications. Do you know which of those medications does what for you?”
My grandmother did not look surprised. “I don’t really know,” she said. “But here, I wrote it down in a book.”
And she proceeded to produce a small notebook. There were about a dozen pages, a running list, on which she’d written the names of medications and, occasionally, what they addressed (“heart,” “cough”). Her handwriting had always been large and loopy, but now it was larger and loopier. There was nothing in there about dementia.
I looked up from the notebook to find that my grandmother had gone to the fridge and brought out a bottle of red wine. It was half empty and had the remnants of a cork in its throat. She was wrestling with the cork. “Should we have some wine to celebrate that you’re here?” she said. “I can’t seem to open it.”
It was seven in the morning.
“Maybe later,” I said. “Right now I need to step out for a little bit to check on something. I’ll be back in an hour.”
She looked disappointed. “Do you have to?”
I did. Reluctantly, my grandmother put the wine back in the fridge.
I went into my room and retrieved my laptop and my book bag. As I was about to leave, the phone rang. My grandmother was using the toilet, so I answered. An elderly woman asked for my grandmother; I said she couldn’t come to the phone but that I’d take a message. The woman identified herself as Alla Aaronovna. My grandmother remained in the toilet. I wrote her a note that Alla Aaronovna had called and left it on the kitchen table. Then I headed out.
My grandmother could hardly have been more centrally located—a fifteen-minute walk to the Kremlin—but it took me forty minutes to find a place to check my email.
I hadn’t seen any cafés or internet spots on my way up from the subway the day before, so the first place I headed was the other subway hub, at Clean Ponds, just up the boulevard from our place. It had always been the busiest and most active spot in the neighborhood, and behind the post office there had once been an internet café, filled with sweaty Russian video game addicts. The area was still very busy: next to the subway entrance was the big post office, a McDonald’s, a bedlam of small kiosks selling cell phones, DVDs, and shish kebabs, and a statue of the poet Griboedov. Beyond Griboedov lay the eponymous clean pond. Catercorner from this agglomeration was the giant RussOil building, headquarters of the country’s largest oil company, built in a black marble that seemed to swallow all the light around it. But the old internet café had been replaced by a German bank. There was no wi-fi.
I retreated to Sretenka and then walked north, along the commercial strip that Sretenka had become. It was a cute, European sort of street, narrower than most, with travel agencies and restaurants and bars, an experimental theater, a Hugo Boss store, and a shitty bookstore with the latest blockbusters in the window that also appeared to have a strip club on the second floor—there was an unlit neon sign hanging before it in the shape of a naked woman. At half past seven in the morning the street was waking up: gleaming black foreign cars sped by on their way out of the center, and once in a while a nicely dressed man or woman stepped out of one while speaking on a sleek mobile phone. This was not the Russia I remembered. I found several European-style cafés, with small tables and little signs in the window that said wi-fi. But they were incredibly expensive. The cheapest item on the menu, a tea, was two hundred rubles—almost nine dollars. On the one hand I needed to figure out if my grandmother had run out of medication for her dementia; on the other hand, nine dollars for a cup of tea. The cafés were filled with nicely dressed Russians, sipping outrageously priced cappuccinos. What the fuck.
I retreated again to our intersection: my grandmother lived just off the corner of Sretenka and the boulevard, although on the other side of the boulevard Sretenka turned into Bolshaya Lubyanka, which headed down to Lubyanka Square, the headquarters of the old KGB, now the FSB. I walked that way now. Compared with Sretenka, just a minute away, it was a desolate walk, as if the organization—thousands of people had been shot in its basement during the terror of the 1930s—had frightened off small businesses. That my grandmother lived so close to the KGB had always been a weird fact of her Moscow existence—on the one hand, central Moscow was where the good property was, so she was very lucky, and on the other hand, it was also where they’d had their execution chambers. It was like living down the street from Auschwitz.
But I needed to check my email.
I walked along the wide, quiet street until I arrived at the KGB. It was a massive building made of dark, heavy granite and it loomed over a large, open rotary, which had once been anchored by a giant statue of the KGB’s founder, Felix Dzerzhinsky. But Dzerzhinsky had been taken down in 1991, and the only thing that remained at the center of the rotary was his pedestal, which had been converted into a giant flowerpot.
To my delight and surprise, however, just off this massive and still terrifying square there was a small comfortable café, the Coffee Grind, with cute little tables, wi-fi, and a chalkboard menu on which I spied at least one drink—their signature cappuccino—for a reasonable seventy-five rubles, three dollars. Maybe it was subsidized by the KGB. Well, good. They owed us. I approached the counter. “Hello!” the pretty barista said, as if she was happy to see me. I ordered the cappuccino and sat down.
I now had only fifteen minutes to check my email if I wanted to be back within the hour. I found Dima’s message with the medical instructions and quickly copied it into a notebook; I then wrote him a short note to ask why there was an exercise bike in my room and also whether he knew if the wireless in his apartment was working. Then I Googled “dementia.” It was a catchall term that included Alzheimer’s. Did my grandmother have Alzheimer’s? I was out of time. I gave myself exactly sixty seconds to look at the Slavic jobs listings website. This was an anonymous site where people posted leads on new jobs and also complaints about their job search. (“I can tell you right now this job is slated for the inside candidate.” “One of the older professors on the search committee is a real creep. He spent the entire interview staring at my boobs.”) This wasn’t the only way to find out about new jobs, but it was the most fun. Today there was nothing. I gave myself thirty seconds to look at Facebook. My old classmates were arriving at their new posts as college professors. There were photos of new offices, requests for syllabus tips (as a way of reminding everyone: I’m a college professor!), and other stuff I thought I would no longer find upsetting once I was halfway across the world. But I still found it upsetting. Alex Fishman, my nemesis from the Slavic department, had posted a beautiful photo of Princeton, where he was starting a post-doc. What a dickhead. I shut the computer, stuck it in my bag, and went back into the street.
