Keith Gessen - A Terrible Country

I was and am barely five foot seven. But my grandmother was now so tiny, I must have looked tall to her. Or so she said.

One day I went out to the so-called market and bought a bunch of groceries; since you had to pay for a plastic bag I always brought my Labyrinth bookstore tote bag with me, and on this occasion I had filled it to the brim with clementines, potatoes, sushki, and my grandmother’s favorite poppy-seed pie. While doing the shopping I had developed an overwhelming need to pee, so I set the tote bag down when I came home, shuffled off my sneakers, and ran to the toilet. When I eventually emerged I saw my grandmother pulling on the handle of the tote with all her might and slowly, slowly dragging it along the floor toward the kitchen. It was an incredible sight. She was an indomitable person. I intercepted her and picked up the bag.

“Are you able to carry all that?” she asked, in awe.

But just as often she could reveal a profound distrust of me. Two incidents stand out. The first took place during a rare visit from Emma Abramovna. She apparently felt bad about my grandmother’s aborted attempt to visit her, and also her son Arkady was staying with her for a few days while his wife and daughter were out of town, so she had access to a car, and she decided to come visit us. My grandmother was thrilled and made elaborate preparations, including sitting down with me and asking very seriously whether I thought the old bottle of wine in the fridge was still good enough to drink, and if not, what I thought we should replace it with. I suggested a bottle of Abkhazian white and went out and got it. The day of the visit, my grandmother put out the plates and silverware and her best napkins early in the morning and we ate breakfast at the table in the back room, so as not to disturb them.

Finally lunchtime arrived and with it Emma Abramovna and Arkady. Arkady was in his early fifties, a quiet computer programmer; he spent much of the visit looking at his phone. In any case, the visit was about my grandmother and Emma Abramovna. It went, as the visits between them usually went, with a discussion of Emma Abramovna’s children (wonderful!) and my grandmother’s grandchildren (neglectful, except for me), their mutual acquaintances (mostly in Israel), and the lousy cold weather. Arkady and I occasionally tried to introduce fresh topics of conversation, with limited success. And then my grandmother—I could practically see this happening—fell into her usual post-lunch funk. “Yes,” she said, “yes,” and then, before I could stop her, “you see, the thing is, everyone has died. Everyone I know has died. All my relatives, all my friends. They died and left me all alone.”

“Come on, Seva,” said Emma Abramovna.

“But it’s true!” my grandmother insisted.

“I’m still alive,” Emma Abramovna said, taking the bait.

“Yes, you, it’s true. But who else?”

“How should I know?!” Emma Abramovna cried. “I’m sure there are other people alive besides me!”

“Yes,” said my grandmother sadly. “Maybe.” And with that, her melancholy filled the room.

After Arkady took Emma Abramovna home, I couldn’t help myself.

“Grandma,” I said. “You so value Emma Abramovna’s friendship. You were so worried whether she’d have a good time. And then she’s here and all you talk about is how lonely you are and how depressed you are.”

“So?” said my grandmother, looking up at me (I was turning around from doing the dishes, and she was relaxing at the kitchen table—social activity always took the wind out of her). “It’s true, isn’t it?”

“That’s not the point! People don’t want to hear how depressed you are!”

“You don’t need to yell,” she said. Then she stood up, placed her mug of tea in the sink, and left the kitchen. I hadn’t been yelling, I didn’t think. But I hadn’t not been yelling either. I watched her walk to her bedroom and close the door behind her. Why I thought I could change my grandmother’s behavior by criticizing it I don’t know. What a jerk I was. I went back to doing the dishes.

The other incident occurred about a week later, when my grandmother announced that she was going to attend her annual physical. How annual it was I had no idea, but I was eager to come along. My grandmother complained of many ailments, but none of them ever seemed to stop her from doing anything, and at the same time she kept going to the pharmacy and bringing home medicines to treat them. So I was looking forward to running her list of medicines past a doctor to see if they seemed about right.

I was not disappointed. The doctor was a nice woman in her fifties with her brown hair tied in a bun; she spoke seriously with my grandmother, listened to her breathing and her heart, and generally gave her a clean bill of health. Then she looked at my grandmother’s list and said to me, “Are you out of your mind?”

“What?”

“Who made this list? Did you make it?”

“She goes to the pharmacy and comes back with these.”

“But half of them are counteractive. Look here, this is a medicine for low blood pressure, and this one is for high blood pressure. She shouldn’t be taking both at once!”

My grandmother had apparently been self-medicating, with the help of the local pharmacist.

“What should she take then?”

The doctor went through the fifteen medicines and crossed out ten. “These are fine,” she said. “And no more additions unless they’re prescribed by an actual doctor.”

I agreed with this approach, and when we got home I threw out all the medicines the doctor had crossed out. My grandmother’s faith in the doctor was total—she had brought a box of chocolates with her as a gift, and had laughed at all the doctor’s jokes and been immensely grateful for the fifteen minutes of attention she received—so I did not anticipate any problems, nor did I even really think she’d notice. But she noticed right away. “What happened to my medicines?” she said after supper.

“The doctor told us to cut down on the medicines you take,” I said. “Here’s the new list.”

“But what happened to the other ones?” she said.

“I threw them out.”

“Why?!”

“So you wouldn’t take them by accident! They weren’t good for you!”

My grandmother put her head in her hands. “How could you do this to me?” she said. “I needed those medicines.” Then: “You don’t want me to get better, do you?”

“What?”

“You want me to be sick.”

“That’s not true!”

“Fine,” she said. “I’ll be sick.” She pursed her lips and, once again, left the kitchen.

I was upset, though this time, at least, I was in the right. And by the next day this whole conversation was forgotten; my grandmother occasionally asked who had crossed out all the medicines on her list, and I told her it was the doctor, and she accepted this. From there on out I tried to make sure she didn’t introduce any new medicines on her own. But this incident stuck with me—that she could turn on me so suddenly, with such conviction, was not good. And in the months ahead it would get worse.

IN A FLURRY of final blog posts on Russian literature—some of them pretty good—my first full PMOOC semester came to an end. I read them over and made individual comments, and by the time the second week of December rolled around I was done.

I had imagined that I’d be back home by now, but as it was I couldn’t afford to fly back and there wasn’t much reason to. My father and his family were going skiing, I no longer had a place to stay in New York, and no one had invited me to any of the holiday Slavic conferences. So I stuck around. I went back to some of the skates I’d been skipping, and played anagrams with my grandmother.