A Terrible Country Read online

  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 midseventies 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 sar
castically 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 Griboedev 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. “Hel
lo!” 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.

  It was eight o’clock in the morning now and even sleepy, scary Bolshaya Lubyanka was stirring to life. Expensive German cars bounced out of the rotary and sped toward Sretenka; others pulled into a large open-air parking lot that must have been for the FSB. Some of the cars made their way onto the sidewalk and parked there; elegantly dressed men and women, on their way to work, maneuvered around them, as if it was perfectly ordinary that someone would park on a sidewalk.