A Terrible Country

by Keith Gessen

  The next day, my grandmother fell down the stairs.

  8.

  MY GRANDMOTHER FALLS DOWN THE STAIRS

  A FEW WEEKS EARLIER I’d finally gotten wi-fi in the apartment. The new semester was in full swing and I was sitting at the kitchen table one evening, answering emails offline from students who thought Tolstoy was making too big a deal out of Anna Karenina’s divorce, when my grandmother came in and asked if I wanted to have some tea and pancakes. I continued working as she made them—was it the end of the world to choose love over your children? Yes, my friends. It was the end of the world, or a world—and when she was done, I lazily put my computer on the windowsill alcove instead of taking it back into my room. As I did so a message popped up from the wireless icon that I had a signal. I didn’t get too excited—when first trying to get internet in the apartment, I’d seen many promising signals—but when as an experiment I opened my browser and typed in the New York Times web address, there was the Gray Lady, telling me the news. I had internet! When I left the windowsill, I lost the signal. But as long as I kept my computer there, pulling up a chair backward and sitting astride it, I was in. I was on the internet.

  My life was changed. I didn’t need to spend five hours at the Coffee Grind every day if I didn’t want to. I didn’t need to download everything before I left the Coffee Grind, or compose my various emails in a word processor at home and then cut and paste them into my Gmail once I was online again. Almost without noticing it, over the months I had developed an entire ad hoc system, held together with wire and string and my own nervous irritation, for communicating with the world. I could now discard it.

  I still went to the Grind just about every day, but not for as long, and I began to spend hours sitting on a chair in the kitchen and working from the windowsill. This meant that I was around more. “Are you going to go to work?” my grandmother, now used to me doing so, asked one morning.

  “I’m going to stay here,” I said, “if that’s OK?”

  “Of course!” my grandmother said. She was very pleased.

  But the windowsill internet also made me less attentive to my grandmother. My emails from students never seemed to end. And beyond that was the fact that there was so much I wanted to read. The October group had an email list that people were always sending things to—articles, proposals for protests, arguments. There was an anarchist, an associate of Shipalkin’s, who occasionally wrote in and accused the Octobrists of dictatorial tendencies, and a communist who wrote in and accused them of sectarianism. The long and sometimes interesting arguments would stretch out over days. I read them from the windowsill, munching on oatmeal cookies and sushki and drinking mug after mug of instant coffee, converting toward the end of the day to tea.

  The night after Sergei’s party I was reading such an argument from the windowsill—I couldn’t now tell you what it was about—when my grandmother told me she was going for a walk. It was snowing out, a little, and slippery, I could see that, but it wasn’t too slippery. Despite the cold my grandmother had been out earlier in the day to get some groceries and had done fine. I felt like maybe I should go with her but I also wanted to continue reading. Was I just going to be trapped my whole life walking out with my grandmother whenever the notion struck her? That was no way to live. I went over and kissed her on the forehead and told her to have a good walk.

  Not thirty minutes later I heard a sharp cry in the stairwell. At first I thought it was a dog or a child, but then I realized exactly who it was. I ran out onto the landing; my grandmother was lying at the bottom of the stairs. She was on her back, and her eyes were open, and she was holding the back of her head and looking at me, and she was scared. I went down the stairs—they were wet and slippery from people clomping snow onto them—and helped her up; her thick pink coat had cushioned the fall, but when I looked at the spot on the back of her head that she was holding, I saw there was blood. “Oh, Andryushenka,” she said as I slowly helped her up the stairs. “I’m so stupid. I’m so stupid. My head is spinning.”

  I got her upstairs, helped her off with her stuff, lay her down on her bed, and then ran to my computer at the windowsill and looked up the emergency number for an ambulance. It was 03. I dialed it and explained that my grandmother had hit her head. The woman on the other end asked if I thought she was in danger. I had no idea. “Is she conscious?” the woman asked. I said yes. This apparently helped her make a determination as to where to send us. She said an ambulance would be there in twenty minutes, and it was.

  In retrospect, I don’t know what I should have done. I’ve asked some doctors I’ve met, and some have said that a blow to the head such as the one my grandmother received when she fell might have been damaging but not life threatening; others have said that all sorts of dangerous bleeding could take place at her age, and that I was right to take her to the hospital. As I say, I don’t know. The ambulance came, two pale young guys in scrubs with a stretcher, and as they gently lay my grandmother on it they suggested I pack her some toiletries and changes of clothing and any books she’d liked to read. My grandmother had no travel bags that I knew of and so I went into my room and dumped the hockey stuff from my CПОРТ backpack and then filled it with some clothes and her toothbrush and glasses. Then we left.

  I’ll never forget the view of Moscow I got from the back of that ambulance as we stopped and started through the traffic on the Garden Ring. After a while my grandmother fell asleep on the gurney next to me; one of the paramedics was sitting in the back with us, playing with his phone, and when I asked if it was all right for her to fall asleep he said yes. I watched the city out the back window. It was covered with a thin white layer of snow, the same snow that my grandmother had slipped on while I sat at my computer, reading my email. From inside the ambulance you could see how cold it was. People walked, in black coats and black hats and black shoes, trying to keep close to the buildings, for warmth. As we stood in traffic at one intersection I saw two cars get into a small fender bender. Without pause, the drivers jumped out and headed for each other. One of them was bigger but the smaller man was quicker; he delivered a couple of long hooks, the bigger guy grabbed his head in pain, and then it was over. They got back in their warm cars and waited for traffic to start moving again.

  When we finally got off the Garden Ring and onto the Kiev highway, I asked the paramedic sitting with me how much longer it would take. “About an hour,” he said.

  “An hour? There’s nothing closer?”

  “They told us to route her to the neurological clinic,” he said, “because it’s a head injury. Don’t worry, it’s a good clinic.”

  We kept going through the industrial neighborhoods and forests at the city’s southern edge. The hospital the ambulance finally arrived at was in the woods. In the dim lights of its driveway I could see an old, long, four-story yellow-brick building; given its distance from the city it might have been a village hospital from before the Revolution. Or after. Who knew. The paramedics carefully rolled my grandmother, covered with a warm blanket, off the ambulance and into the hospital. She was now awake. She did not seem disturbed by the proceedings; in fact, she seemed to like them. Her health had been troubling her. Now here were some people who were taking it seriously. “Thank you,” she kept saying to the paramedics. “Thank you.”

  From inside, the hospital looked even older. A rickety elevator took us to the top floor and then we walked down a dimly lit corridor. It was getting late now, and most of the doors to the rooms were closed. Cheap old wooden chairs out in the hallway suggested that during the daytime there might have been visitors.

  We arrived at an open door, where a young man in green hospital gear with dark circles under his eyes sat smoking a cigarette. This turned out to be the head neurologist. “Hello, Arkady Ivanovich,” one of my paramedics said. “Woman fell down, hit her head, there’s some minor bleeding. Dispatcher said we should take her to you.”

  “Tak
e her to examination room four-ten, please,” said the neurologist, and then followed us there.

  I felt a little as my grandmother felt—it was a relief to have her and her health, finally, in the hands of professionals—but I was also apprehensive. This place was dirty and far from home. I wasn’t sure if I could trust these people. For reasons I didn’t understand, the paramedics hung around outside the doorway of the examination room even after they’d moved my grandmother to the examination table and repossessed their gurney. Noting this, the doctor looked from them to me.

  “You know,” he said very quietly, “they don’t get paid very much.”

  “Oh!” I said. I pulled out my wallet and found five hundred rubles and handed them to the paramedic who’d sat in back with me.

  “Thank you,” he said, and finally left.

  In the examination room the young doctor checked the back of my grandmother’s head, shone a light in her eyes, and asked her some questions. When it was done he told her and me that she was safe for the moment but that it would be wise to keep an eye on her and run some tests while she was here.

  “What do you think, Seva Efraimovna?” he asked her gently.

  My grandmother turned to me. “Whatever Andryusha thinks is best,” she said.

  I straightened up. “Would we be able to go home tomorrow?” I asked.

  “No,” said the doctor. “This will take a week.”

  “A week?” In America, I would have been concerned about the cost; in Russia, it was something else. The medical care was free. But I was concerned about leaving my grandmother for such a long time. I looked around the room, with its tall ceiling and chipped blue paint. I was concerned about leaving her here.

  The doctor followed my gaze. “It doesn’t look like much but this is a decent hospital,” he said. “But I can’t force you to keep her here. Sometimes the cranial bleeding from a fall like this doesn’t show up right away. But of course there may not be any bleeding. It’s up to you.”

  I felt the pressure of medical expertise. If she dies, or suffers brain damage, or is otherwise hampered in her functioning, he was saying, because you thought that our peeling paint meant that we didn’t know anything about medicine—it’ll be on you, not me.

  “Grandma,” I said, “do you want to stay here a little while so they can run some tests?”

  “OK,” said my grandmother. “If you think I should, I will.”

  I didn’t know what to think. But I also felt like I had no other choice. “I do,” I said.

  “Then OK.”

  “OK,” said the doctor. “Visiting hours are noon to eight. I’ll have a nurse bring her to her room.”

  And he left us. A few minutes later a nurse came in with a wheelchair and with my help put my grandmother in it and wheeled her to a bed in a large room down the hall. The lights inside the room were dimmed; there was a curtain, on the other side of which appeared to be another bed and, it seemed, another patient. At the nurse’s signal we lifted my grandmother from the wheelchair to the bed. She was incredibly light.

  The nurse was a big blond woman in her forties. She was careful with my grandmother and seemed to know what she was doing. After we put my grandmother in bed, she left.

  My grandmother had been awake but subdued since we’d arrived. I now took out her toiletries and extra clothes and placed them on her bedside table. I also wrote down my phone number. “I will be back tomorrow,” I said.

  “OK,” she said. “Do you have the key to my apartment?”

  “I do.”

  “Good. There is still some soup left over—make sure you eat it.”

  “OK,” I said. I kissed her on the forehead and left.

  * * *

  • • •

  The metro was closed by the time I got out of there and I had to get a cab home. It cost twenty-five dollars. When I returned to the empty apartment I cleaned up the mess I’d made when I packed, put on the potato soup to heat up, and opened my computer. In the Gchat bar, Dima’s little green light was on. I messaged him.

  “Grandma’s in the hospital,” I said.

  He wrote back right away. “What??”

  “She fell down the stairs and hit her head. The doctor says it’s not dangerous.”

  “Where were you when this happened?”

  “I was in the apartment.”

  “I told you about those stairs!”

  I didn’t say anything to that.

  “Are you home now?” asked Dima.

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll call you.”

  A minute later the phone rang.

  “Which hospital is she in?” said Dima.

  “Neurological Clinic Number Eight,” I said. I had taken a card with me and studied it. “It’s way out at the end of the Kiev highway.”

  “Fuck!” said Dima. “That’s a state hospital. They have private hospitals now where you can get decent care.”

  I didn’t say anything. Of course I’d had no idea. Probably I should have called Dima right away, but everything had happened so quickly.

  “Can you move her?” Dima said.

  “This place is OK,” I said. “It’s not bad. And it’s devoted to neurology.”

  “Move her to the American Clinic,” said Dima. “It’s right near Prospekt Mira. You’ll be able to walk there.”

  “How much does it cost?”

  “I’ll pay for it,” said Dima.

  “I’ll think about it,” I said. I didn’t want to put my grandmother back in an ambulance for two hours while she still had a head wound. And I didn’t want Dima paying for her.

  “If you keep her at this place at least give the doctor some money,” he said. “Give him three thousand rubles.” A hundred dollars. “And give the nurse five hundred. It’ll help.”

  “OK,” I said.

  “You had one thing to do,” said Dima. “You had one fucking thing you were supposed to do.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Unbelievable,” said Dima, and hung up.

  My soup had partly boiled out of the saucepan. I ate what remained and spent an hour online reading about head trauma. Then I went to bed. It was the first time in my life I’d had the family apartment all to myself. I slept badly.

  * * *

  • • •

  Over the course of the next week the hospital tested my grandmother for every manner of neurological ailment. They took her through machines, hooked her up to monitors, and told her to read letters and numbers from a big board. She did it all obediently; she was relieved that someone finally thought she was sick.

  I spent that week on the bus that ran from in front of the hospital to the nearest metro station and back. The bus did not seem to keep a regular schedule, and often in the interest of getting out of the cold I boarded it going in the wrong direction, since there was only one bus on the route and it would be coming back in my direction anyway. It was warmer on the bus than it was outside, though never quite warm enough.

  I decided not to move my grandmother. She was comfortable in her room, and the staff was attentive. I was nervous about paying money to the doctor but it worked out. I had been unable to find any unused envelopes in my grandmother’s apartment and so folded my three 1,000-ruble bills into a ripped-out page from one of my notebooks; this looked pretty ridiculous and when I caught the doctor in his little office and thrust it at him, he demurred. But I insisted. “Please,” I said. Finally he agreed and, opening the top drawer of his desk, stuffed the makeshift envelope inside. “It’s unnecessary,” he said, looking at me with dignity, “but thank you.”

  And that was that. No receipt, no exchange of goods, and afterward I went back to my grandmother’s room. But the payment worked, at least for me. I felt like I had bought a small part of the hospital. I was no longer a stranger there. And after I paid off the
nurses too I noticed that my grandmother had an extra blanket and that they rolled a television into her room.

  My grandmother’s neighbor turned out to be a garrulous woman named Vladlenna. She was just a few years younger than my grandmother but large where my grandmother was small and loud where my grandmother was quiet. On the morning of my first visit I found my grandmother in bed and Vladlenna regaling her with tales of her health. “Oh, Vladlenna Viktorovna, this is my grandson Andrei,” said my grandmother.

  “Nice to meet you, Andryusha!” Vladlenna hollered from her bed. She was holding some kind of yellow half-knit object in her lap and working on it as she spoke. She weighed two hundred pounds if she weighed anything. “Seva,” she hollered, “is this guy married?”

  “I’m afraid not,” my grandmother said.

  “Well, we’ll take right care of that!” said Vladlenna. “I know lots of girls!” And she cackled. I smiled politely. The truth was, if it weren’t for the recent advent of Yulia, I’d probably have asked Vladlenna for some phone numbers.

  My grandmother had been changed into a green hospital gown, and there was still a bandage on the back of her head. I couldn’t tell if it was fresh or not. Other than that, she looked OK. She still had her strength. She smiled when she saw me.

  “How is the food here?” I asked.

  My grandmother shook her head, as if to indicate that the food was unspeakably bad.

  “It’s pretty good!” Vladlenna shouted from her side of the room. “This morning they gave us oatmeal with jam and some nice tea!”