A Terrible Country Read online

  “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.

  2.

  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 ba
nker’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.

  3.

  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.