Keith Gessen - A Terrible Country

IN THE SECOND WEEK of September, my grandmother’s best friend, Emma Abramovna, came back to town from her dacha. We went to visit her right away.

Emma Abramovna was originally from Poland but had moved to Moscow in advance of Hitler in the late 1930s; she had met my grandmother in the forties at Moscow State, where both of them were young professors. Jewish women in an official environment that was becoming increasingly hostile to Jews, they became friends. Unlike my grandmother, though, Emma Abramovna had somehow managed to remain at the university throughout all the changes that took place in the USSR. She was a tremendously charismatic, outspoken person, with absolutely no fear of authority, and she was often, according to my grandmother, in conflict with the university administration; perhaps her very outspokenness had protected her. In any case, even after her daughter emigrated to Israel in the late eighties, she remained in Moscow. Her two sons had remained in the city, and this was a tremendous help.

Emma Abramovna lived in an old building off the huge Tverskaya thoroughfare, up the street from Patriarch Ponds, about a mile and a half from us. Though it was nearby as the crow flies or the young person walks, on the subway there was no direct route; we had to go south on the red line and then transfer and head northwest on the green one. My grandmother was a little wobbly by the time we arrived, but at least we didn’t need to climb any stairs; some years earlier, when Emma Abramovna started having trouble with her hips, her sons traded her apartment on the fourth floor for a similar apartment, in the same building, on the first. We came in, walked down a corridor, and were at her door.

We were greeted by Emma Abramovna’s caretaker, a large, round, friendly woman from Moldova named Valya. While I took a quick tour of the apartment, she helped my grandmother orient herself and get ready in the mirror. “What an old lady,” my grandmother kept saying, “what a scary old lady”—visiting Emma Abramovna brought out my grandmother’s fear that she was not attractive. And I was having simultaneously my own insecurities. The apartment was incredible. The floors were new, the walls and ceilings had fresh coats of paint, and Emma Abramovna’s sons (or someone) had installed a special stand-up shower booth, with handles all along its perimeter, to make it easier for Emma Abramovna to get in and out. It made me feel powerfully ashamed of the job Dima and I were doing on Sretenka.

“Musya,” my grandmother was saying when I joined them in the living room, also Emma Abramovna’s bedroom. Emma Abramovna half sat, half lay on the couch, a blanket across her lap, while my grandmother perched on a small chair that Valya had pulled up for her at the foot of the couch. “Musya, look at you, you are so beautiful.”

It was true. Emma Abramovna was Baba Seva’s age almost exactly, and she was not in the best of health: her hips barely functioned; she used a walker and needed a great deal of help getting in and out of chairs. And yet unlike my grandmother she glowed. She had thick curly hair, now gray, that came up from her head in a small Afro, and her olive skin color and brown eyes suited her still. It was strange to see someone from my grandmother’s generation so animated and even cheerful; my grandmother apparently found it strange as well.

“Look at your hair,” she went on describing her friend’s beauty. “It’s so thick!”

“Sevochka, cut it out,” Emma Abramovna said.

“What?”

“I said stop it!”

“It’s not my fault you’re beautiful!” my grandmother insisted.

“Andrei.” Emma Abramovna turned to me. “How are you? How long are you here?”

I told her I didn’t know, but a few months at the least.

“That’s wonderful,” said Emma Abramovna. “Seva is very happy you’re here.”

“But he’ll leave eventually,” my grandmother said sadly.

“Yes, but he’s here now!”

“That’s true,” my grandmother said, still very sadly. “That’s true.”

And on it went, over a variety of subjects as disparate as the state of contemporary film to the outcome of the Second World War. My grandmother would say something pessimistic, to be corrected by Emma Abramovna, or alternately Emma Abramovna would say something optimistic, to be contradicted by my grandmother. And then of course there was the dacha.

“Did you have a good time at Peredelkino?” asked my grandmother.

“Yes, it was lovely. Borya”—her youngest son—“made a lot of improvements over the winter. And I had visitors throughout August. I don’t know what I’d do without Peredelkino.”

Emma Abramovna always said exactly what she thought. This was an admirable trait, and yet it also meant that she didn’t pick up signals from people who were more subtle or indirect about things, like my grandmother.

“I had a dacha once,” my grandmother said now. “We always went there during the summer.”

“I know, Sevochka.” Emma Abramovna softened momentarily.

“Now I have nowhere to go,” my grandmother said.

This was clearly an opening for Emma Abramovna to suggest that my grandmother come visit her next summer, but she didn’t seem to think so and let it pass.

“You’re so lucky that you had three kids,” my grandmother continued. “They take such good care of you.”

“You could have had more kids!” Emma Abramovna lost her temper a little. “No one was stopping you!”

“Yes,” my grandmother said, in the way one does when actually deep down disagreeing. “Maybe.”

Still and all, the whole thing was about as animated and happy as I’d seen my grandmother since I’d come to Moscow. This was her one remaining friend and contemporary. And surely Emma Abramovna would eventually catch the hint about the dacha.

As soon as we were out the door, my grandmother turned to me, as if she’d been waiting to do so the entire time, and said, “Poor Musya. She can’t walk anymore. Imagine that? I don’t know what I’d do if I couldn’t walk.”

For our trip home we caught a car. One of the undeniably non-terrible things about Moscow was that you could hail a random car on the street and it would give you a ride for a reasonable price. It had been one of the ways Russians adapted to the shortages of Communism—there weren’t nearly enough cabs to go around, so people just started offering each other rides. When I was little my father used to go out a few nights a week and look for fares; it was an ordinary activity for people with cars, including people with cars and advanced engineering degrees. This practice lasted well into the post-Soviet era, though one thing I had noticed since I arrived was that fewer and fewer Muscovites felt like earning three dollars for driving someone a mile down the boulevard. You had to look for beat-up old Russian-made cars; their drivers were poor enough to take you. On this occasion we got lucky, and one of the first cars my grandmother hailed was old and Russian, and stopped. On the ride home she was in a garrulous mood and quizzed the driver about his dacha. He was from Armenia, it turned out, and had a dacha outside Yerevan. It had a beautiful garden, he said, though he hadn’t been there in three years, as he was here in Moscow trying to earn some money.

“Yes,” said my grandmother. “A dacha is a very good thing.”

As we entered our apartment, she turned to me. “It’s terrible about Musya’s legs, but in another sense she is very lucky. Her kids take such good care of her. That was my mistake. I only had one kid. Don’t only have one kid. Have three kids. Then they’ll take care of you.”

I went to bed that night and thought: Didn’t my grandmother have a daughter, and didn’t that daughter have two sons, and weren’t we taking care of her now? My grandmother’s suggestion was that no, we were not. And compared to what Emma Abramovna’s sons were doing for her, it was hard to argue. I was there, yes, but also I was not there. My PMOOC classes were more arduous than I had expected: I had sixty students across the four sections, which meant hundreds of blog posts and, as the semester progressed, hundreds of emails, which meant hundreds of emails that I had to answer in a timely fashion because the PMOOC administrators swore by the student evaluations—they really had nothing else to go on—and there was nothing students took to less kindly than someone not answering their emails. Whether I wanted to or not I had to spend hours at the Coffee Grind. And, in truth, I did want to. My grandmother did not make it easy to keep her company. She was depressed; she complained. She complained about everything. Had I been doing great myself I might have been more sympathetic, but I too was a little bummed out. After my initial hope of interviewing her was disappointed, I hadn’t thought of another way forward. All the topics seemed taken; the field was crowded. I would never find something unique and my own. Perversely, this made me spend more time at the Coffee Grind looking at people’s Facebook pages. My failure as an academic was not making me a success as a grandson.