A Terrible Country

by Keith Gessen

  “Is that true?” I asked my grandmother.

  She looked confused. “You know,” she said, “I don’t remember.”

  “Ha!” Vladlenna said. “I’m not saying it was the most memorable thing that’s ever happened and we all need to remember it for the rest of our lives. Ha-ha!”

  I sat with them for a while and then went and found the cafeteria. I ate a bowl of borscht and a plate of kasha and kotlety, all for about three dollars, and bought some small pies they had by the cash register to take up to my grandmother and Vladlenna. I stayed until eight, alternately hanging out, working on my laptop while my grandmother napped, and exchanging pleasantries with Vladlenna. Then I started on the long, cold ride home.

  And so it was every day. I was able to get some work done in the morning, get on the subway to the bus, and then spend the remainder of the time (it took almost two hours to reach the hospital) with my grandmother and her roommate. The CT scan showed no internal bleeding, but they proceeded to do the whole raft of other neurological tests, as they said, “while they had her.” All these came back negative. My grandmother was in good health.

  “Are you sure?” I asked the doctor when, on the final day, he delivered this report to me. I said, “She’s always forgetting things. Basic things.”

  “How old is she?”

  “Eighty-nine.”

  “Exactly right. She has medium-stage dementia, which for her age, after the life she’s led—it’s good. It’s above average.”

  “There’s nothing she could take? She’s pretty depressed.”

  When questioned by the doctor earlier about these very symptoms, I had underplayed them. But now that he was giving her a perfectly clean bill of health, I wanted to argue.

  “You live in America, is that right?” said the doctor.

  I nodded.

  “I know that in America they prescribe medication for this sort of thing. Maybe they’re right to do so. But these are powerful drugs. They have side effects. Here, we’re more careful. My advice is to keep your grandmother as mentally engaged as you can. Talk to her. Argue with her. Her memory is going to disappear, but you can slow that down. And she can still enjoy her family. She can still enjoy the outdoors. These drugs can slow some of the processes but they might break something else in her brain or body—I would avoid them.” The doctor nodded, as if to say, “Enough.” He had never said so many words to me at once, and I was surprised and grateful. “Vot tak,” he said. “So that’s that.” “Good luck.” And he reached out his hand for me to shake.

  All this for a hundred dollars.

  It was time to go home. I called a cab and went to fetch my grandmother, who was now dressed in her ordinary clothes again, and helped her up out of bed.

  She nearly collapsed in my arms. The nurse was there and saw it. “She’s been lying in bed for a week,” she said. “It’ll be a little while before she gets her strength back. But she will.”

  We said good-bye to Vladlenna, who handed us a piece of paper with her phone number on it, and I supported my grandmother down the hall and to the elevator. The young doctor came out to say good-bye to us. “It’s been a pleasure having you, Seva Efraimovna,” he said.

  “Thank you,” she said, beaming.

  They seemed to have genuinely cared for her and were sorry to see her go.

  But a terrible thing had happened. Forcing an elderly woman who was used to walking several miles a day, even if only back and forth through her apartment, to lie in bed for such a long stretch of time was hugely destructive. They had meant her no harm! But my grandmother came in with a mild head injury and left with a limp. On our way out we bought her a cane in the hospital shop.

  In the cab, I asked my grandmother when she intended to call her new friend Vladlenna.

  “That woman?” said my grandmother. “I’m not going to call her. She’s an anti-Semite.”

  “What? How do you know?”

  “I know,” said my grandmother. “I could tell by the way she said ‘Seva Efraimovna.’ Let me see her phone number.”

  I handed her the little sheet. My grandmother crumpled it up and then, before I could stop her, rolled down her window a little bit and threw it out.

  “Hey!” said the driver. “If they pull me over you’re paying the ticket.”

  My grandmother didn’t hear him. As for me, I was in shock.

  “Did you hear me?” said the driver.

  “Yes,” I said. “Don’t worry about it.”

  We drove on. My grandmother had outlived all her friends, but that didn’t mean she was in the market for new ones.

  9.

  HOUSEKEEPING

  THROUGHOUT THE TIME my grandmother was in the hospital I had not seen Yulia. We had texted a bit—I’d never texted in Russian before, and I enjoyed it; I’d gotten a cheap Russian phone after my Samsung started acting up, and it corrected my spelling—but it wasn’t like I was going to drag her to the hospital, and I had no time for anything else. On the bus to and from the hospital I had spun out numerous fantasies about our next date, but as soon as my grandmother returned I was confronted with another problem.

  The morning after we got back I woke up to find my grandmother in the kitchen, slowly grating an apple, as usual. I kissed her on the back of her perfectly healed head, which still had a little bandage on it.

  “Oh, Andryush,” said my grandmother, twisting around. The cane we’d bought at the hospital was leaning up against the wall next to her chair. She said, “What are we going to do?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What are we going to eat?”

  “I can make breakfast,” I said.

  “And for lunch?”

  “For lunch we’ll go to a café.” I decided this on the spot. We’d go to the Coffee Grind! It would be a wonderful opportunity for my grandmother to get some exercise, and also to see where I spent so much time, and for lunch she could eat one of their tuna sandwiches. The other time we’d stopped at a café, on one of our walks, she’d declared the food inedible, but maybe the Grind would be different. It was too expensive to be a long-term solution, but it would get us through the day, and then tomorrow I could cook.

  “A café?” said my grandmother incredulously. The way she said it I could tell she was thinking of a short counter, a couple of tables, maybe an espresso machine. “They won’t have anything to eat at a café.”

  “It’s more like a restaurant. We’re going to a restaurant.”

  “A restaurant?” Now she was thinking of a banquet hall, a meal with multiple courses, lots of vodka, loud music, probably dancing. It was something you went to once a year, for a birthday or wedding. “That’s very expensive.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  “Of course it is! It’s a restaurant.”

  “This isn’t a fancy restaurant. It’s more like a cafeteria.”

  “Oh, a cafeteria.” She pictured a large spacious room, picking up a tray and getting some kasha and kotlety and soup ladled onto your plate, like in an American prison. “OK.”

  So later that day we went to the cafeteria. It was a five-minute walk down Bolshaya Lubyanka, maybe six, and as we made our way my grandmother oohed and aahed as we tried not to slip on the ice. I held her tightly by the arm, and she began gingerly to make use of her cane. We walked by an art gallery that had recently appeared, and some girls were outside, with their coats off, smoking. “Look at those girls,” said my grandmother loudly, of the scantily clad smokers. “They’re not wearing any clothes!” She was weaker and had a limp but she was at least getting her spirit back.

  I kept my head down and finally we were there. We navigated the step up into the Coffee Grind, the pretty barista greeted us brightly from across the room, as she greeted everyone, and I guided my grandmother to a seat. It was strange to be here with her—I felt nervous, as though, if she didn
’t like it, the Grind would fall in my esteem. I had to make sure she didn’t see the prices, so I asked her to stay put while I got some food. She agreed. I ordered a pot of tea, two little cabbage pies, and two tuna sandwiches. It cost twenty-five dollars. I paid quickly and shoved the change in my pocket. My grandmother, back at our table, hadn’t noticed the prices. Then, to my surprise, she ate her food without any complaint. Perhaps at the hospital her high standards had been slightly adjusted down.

  “Andryush,” she said, as we drank our tea after the meal. “You are a good person. You’re not going to stay here, are you?”

  “In what sense?” I wasn’t sure what she wanted to hear.

  “In this country. Don’t stay in this country. It’s a terrible country. Good people become bad people, or bad things happen to them.”

  She bent over slowly and sipped at the tea, which was still hot. Sometimes, when her tea was too hot, she would pour it out into a dish to cool it down, and sip it from the dish. She did so now.

  “Did I ever tell you about Leva’s company?” she said.

  “A little,” I said.

  “He had a wonderful idea, and he made a company with his friends,” she said. “They were people he trusted. And then”—I saw her struggling to remember—“something bad happened.” She couldn’t remember the story, but she remembered its lessons. “He trusted them and they betrayed him,” she said. “That’s what happened.”

  I nodded. It was, basically, what had happened, and in addition to everything else it saddened me that this is what my grandmother spent her final years thinking about.

  “So,” my grandmother concluded, “don’t stay in this country. It’s a terrible country.”

  She finished drinking her tea and leaned back a little in her chair. Yes, I thought, it’s a terrible country a lot of the time, but here we were, across the street from the KGB no less, and it wasn’t so bad. You could find little oases here, little islands of peace. Then, before I could think of a way to stop her, my grandmother took out her teeth and put them in the dish where the tea had been. I’d never seen her do this in public, though of course we’d hardly ever eaten out together. I glanced around the Coffee Grind; I had put us at a corner table, out of the way of things, and no one seemed to be paying attention. I relaxed.

  We sat in contented silence for a while. My grandmother had lost a lot of weight at the hospital, and she was pale. Well, we’d take care of that! Eventually I cleared our plates. As I deposited them at the counter, I heard a wail behind me. I turned to see a little boy, about age three, with his mother; they had been sitting at an angle to us but now, as the mother was getting the boy dressed to leave, he saw my grandmother and her teeth and was pointing at them. “Mama,” he was yelling, terrified, “what happened to her teeth?” I turned to my grandmother. She couldn’t understand why he was screaming and was making toothless faces at him to try to cheer him up. She loved little kids. The more she made faces at him, the harder the boy cried. I didn’t know what to do; I walked back to my grandmother and then stood helplessly beside her. The mother gave me a reproachful look as she finally finished dressing the boy and picked him up and out of the Coffee Grind. Oblivious, my grandmother put her teeth back into her mouth and announced that it was time to go.

  As we made our way slowly out the door, the pretty barista who had greeted us approached and, speaking quietly enough that my grandmother couldn’t hear, told me not to bring her back again.

  My grandmother nodded politely at her. “Thank you very much,” she said.

  On a parallel track, I was indignant. “I come in here every day and you’re telling me I can’t bring my grandmother?”

  The barista was unfazed. “We need to keep up certain standards here. And as for you, I’m sorry, you come in every day and buy the cheapest item on the menu and then sit for five hours with your computer.”

  This was low. “You know what?” I said. “I won’t be troubling you anymore.”

  “So be it,” said the barista, and bowed slightly.

  “And your cappuccinos are inedible.”

  She bowed again, though I did see some color come to her face.

  I turned my head and walked out with my grandmother.

  “Andryusha,” she said, once we were in the street. “Thank you for that lunch. For supper we can have some cottage cheese with jam. But what will we do tomorrow?”

  I was seething. My grandmother should not have taken her teeth out, it’s true. But it’s not like she came in every day and took out her teeth. This was an emergency. And as for my sitting there for five hours, that was also true. But it was the purpose of a café that people could sit there for a while! Ahhh!

  “Andryush,” my grandmother said again. “What will we do tomorrow?”

  “I’m going to cook,” I said roughly.

  “Do you know how?” said my grandmother.

  “You’re going to teach me.”

  “OK,” said my grandmother, and patted me a little nervously on the arm.

  We walked back up Bolshaya Lubyanka. “You know,” said my grandmother, “that is the big scary building.” She gestured to the KGB headquarters across the street. “But this”—she gestured to a small, cute, green nineteenth-century building to our left—“is where they carried out most of the executions.”

  “Really?” I said. I’d always assumed it was the big building across the street.

  “Yes,” said my grandmother matter-of-factly. “Bolshaya Lubyanka Eleven. This is it.”

  And we kept walking.

  * * *

  • • •

  I got up the next morning to a worried grandmother. “Andryush,” she said, “what are we going to do?” I reminded her that I was going to be cooking and proceeded to make us some eggs and instant coffee. But of course more generally she was right. Even if we did find something to eat, what were we going to do? In general. With our lives. I didn’t know.

  I had never learned to cook. This hadn’t felt like a moral failing on my part; now it did. Many factors had conspired to create this failing in me. I had spent much of my life in universities, with their cafeterias and pizza nights and free sandwiches in exchange for attending someone’s lecture. I had lived in New York, where you could always buy a hot dog or chicken on a stick, and if you were in a part of town where the guys charged too much, you could bargain with them. I had dated girls who cooked, and when there was no one else to cook and I didn’t have enough money to buy a sandwich, I went to the store and bought a can of chickpeas and a can of tuna and a packet of pasta. Chickpeas plus tuna plus some olive oil was a salad; pasta plus butter was an entrée. In this way I would feed myself. But of course I could never feed someone else this way. I had never had to.

  My grandmother had grown up in a country where, for all its promises of communal living, there were very few public places to get something to eat. If you were not able to cook, and cook frugally, make the most of the paltry ingredients available, then you would go hungry. You had to cook or you would starve.

  So maybe I could finally change. After breakfast I placed pen and paper before my grandmother and demanded a shopping list. I was going to make kotlety and potatoes, plus potato soup. This would provide us two or three days of food, depending on how quickly we ate the kotlety. Then I would cook again.

  In her large round hand my grandmother produced a list: a kilogram of meat at the basement butcher’s on Sretenka, preferably with not too much fat in it, a loaf of bread, and milk—the bread was cheapest at the bakery on the boulevard, my grandmother said, and milk was cheapest at the so-called market. For potato soup, a quart of milk and two kilograms of potatoes, also cheapest at the market. Onions and flour we had.

  I considered disobeying her instructions as to where to buy what but knew that she’d be able to tell, and so I went to the butcher on Sretenka, the bakery on the boulevard, and finally t
he market. Then I returned and laid the groceries proudly on the counter. Sitting in her chair at the kitchen table, my grandmother instructed me in the grinding of the meat—I cut it up and then trimmed it of as much fat as possible, something that was difficult to do because the fat was thickly intertwined with the meat, so that after picking at it with my knife and ripping off a certain amount with my fingers, I gave up. I began to grind the meat, mixing in bread and a little bit of milk as I went. The meat grinder was manual, meaning I had to turn a handle like in olden times, and I enjoyed this until, about halfway through our cut of meat, the grinder slowed down. Then it stopped. “What happened?” I asked my grandmother.

  “The fat has gummed it up,” she said. “You need to take it apart.” I took it apart and laboriously scraped off the fat. Then I washed it and put it back together again. There were only a few parts to the meat grinder so it wasn’t complicated, but getting one of the smaller iron fittings back in place took a while.

  Eventually I had ground the kilo of meat, half a loaf of white bread, milk, and an onion into a ground beef mixture. That turned out to be the easy part. Next I covered the countertop in flour, caked my own hands in the flour, like an Olympic weight lifter, and with these floured hands rolled the ground beef into little spheres. “You don’t want them too small or too dense,” my grandmother instructed. In the end, unfortunately, they were not dense enough, and when I put them in the frying pan, they began to crumble. I watched over them with trepidation and tried with a wooden spatula manually to solder back the pieces that were falling off. But this was not possible.

  In between these activities or after them my grandmother taught me how to make kasha. I had not known. Kasha, or grechka, buckwheat, was the staple of the Russian diet, eaten in the morning with milk, in the afternoon with kotlety, in the evening in little buckwheat cakes, if you were lucky. Without kasha there was nothing, and until this day I did not know how to make it.