Keith Gessen - A Terrible Country

My grandmother was not taken in. “They can go to hell,” she said, and threw out the postcard.

A little while later, as I sat in the kitchen sipping instant coffee and listening to Echo, my grandmother came in and handed me a key.

“Andryush,” she said. “I just found this key. Do you know what it’s from?”

It was a small, old-style desk or cabinet key, and I figured there couldn’t possibly be too many answers to that question. “Let’s see,” I said. With my grandmother trailing behind me, I went into her room and tried it on the desk drawer, which was already unlocked. Happily, it was not the key. And then I tried it on the standing shelf in her room, which had been locked the entire time I was here, and which now, voilà, opened.

“Hooray!” said my grandmother.

“Did you need something in here?” I asked.

“I don’t know!” said my grandmother. “What’s in there?”

There were many things. My grandmother’s old work papers. Her old photos. Various other documents. And then, above it all, there was an old chocolate box full of letters. They were from my mother to my grandmother, after we emigrated. And then my grandmother’s letters to my mother—my father must have sent them back to my grandmother at some point, after my mother died.

I spent all day reading the letters. My mother’s were filled with long, lively, not always ecstatic descriptions of our life in America, my childhood, Dima’s rebellion, her occasional alienation from my practical father; my grandmother’s contained sad evaluations of the home lives of the friends and relatives my mother had left behind. About her own life my grandmother spoke with a kind of hollow bravado. Even in letters designed to assuage her daughter’s guilt about leaving her, my grandmother couldn’t help but let a note of sadness enter. The winters in Dubna were so drab; the movies that she saw in Moscow disappointed her. And there was an envy or even resentment of Uncle Lev, disguised as wonderment. “He is entirely consumed by his work, he won’t even tear himself away from it when we’re traveling—when we were in Koktebel last month he started wondering why no one had ever checked for oil there. An amazing person!” This was not sarcastic exactly, but it was a little rueful: my grandmother had chosen a profession that turned out to be implicated in all sorts of political nonsense, and she had had, essentially, to abandon it, whereas Uncle Lev had become a scientist, and, tempted as the Party had been at times to meddle in science, it left its oilmen alone.

Above all, in my grandmother’s letters there was a longing to be reunited with her daughter, a feeling that the center of her world had disappeared. The letters were incredibly frequent—as many as one a week for the first few years, and then never less than one a month until the late 1980s, when telephone contact became easier. My mother had a nickname for my grandmother; my grandmother addressed my mother as “my beloved little daughter.” And though the letters were sophisticated, ironic, full of conversation about movies they’d seen and books they’d read, they addressed each other with total, unaffected honesty. Though it made perfect sense—my grandmother had raised my mother all alone, through some of the most difficult years of the century—I had had no idea, really, how close they had been. I had no idea how much they had missed each other. There was even talk, as the Soviet Union started falling down around their ears, of my grandmother and Uncle Lev coming to Boston to live. It never happened. Uncle Lev had a security clearance, and even in the final years of the USSR people like that were not allowed to leave. And then my mother died.

“It’s my fault, you know, that she left,” my grandmother said after reading through a few of the letters herself.

“In what sense?”

We were in my grandmother’s room—I on the green armchair next to her bed, she in the bed that turned into a sofa, resting.

“I told her the truth,” said my grandmother. “Even when she was a little girl, I told her the truth about this place, about what a terrible country this was. So when she became old enough, she left.”

I didn’t say anything. My grandmother hadn’t told her all the truth—she hadn’t revealed the secret of Aunt Klava, for example—but that wasn’t the point.

“And it’s my fault that she died,” my grandmother went on. “When she worked here, they had mandatory mammograms. But not in America. If she had stayed here, they would have caught it in time.”

“You don’t know that,” I said automatically. But now I understood what she had meant all those times she said that my mother had gone to America and died. I had thought it was a statement of two unconnected facts. But my mother had died of breast cancer after a diagnosis that arrived too late. My grandmother had a point.

That evening, I got us a bottle of wine and we drank to the New Year. “It’s so nice to have you here with me, Andryushenka,” my grandmother said. I was very moved. She called Emma Abramovna to wish her a happy New Year and went to bed early. For my part, I went across the landing to see the soldiers. They were going to a big party later on but for the moment they were having a mini-pre-party at their place.

After we’d had a couple of beers, Howard took me aside.

“Listen,” he said, “I need to ask you a favor.”

He had met a girl through his customer-reviewed sex worker website and gone over to her place. “I show up, and her mother is there in the kitchen. A very nice lady. We drank tea together and then this girl takes me into her room and fucks me. Can you believe that? I felt like a teenager. It was one of the most erotic experiences I’ve ever had.”

Howard paused. What favor could he possibly have in mind to ask of me?

“I’d like to write her a very good review, but in Russian,” said Howard. “If I write it and email it to you, will you check it over so that it doesn’t have too many mistakes?”

A few days later, I received some interesting news. My adviser called me on the phone. “ S novym godom !” he shouted. Happy New Year.

“Thank you,” I said.

“I have some sad news,” said my adviser. “Frank Miller has died.”

Frank Miller was a beloved professor of Russian studies at a place called Watson College. Watson was a small undistinguished liberal arts school located in the far frigid reaches of upstate New York, but it had going for it that an eccentric alumnus, who had made millions manufacturing weapons systems at the height of the Cold War, had endowed a permanent professorship in Russian history and literature. Frank Miller had occupied it with distinction. He was also a close friend of and mentor to my adviser, and when Miller had gone on sabbatical a few years earlier, my adviser had arranged for me to take over his classes. I had done my best, both to teach the classes and stave off depression, and the student evaluations had been good.

“I didn’t know he was sick,” I said.

“No, he kept it quiet. And it was pretty sudden. Over Thanksgiving he got the news that it was in his liver, and from there it happened really fast.”

“That sucks,” I said.

“It does suck,” said my adviser. “But here’s the thing. Get your CV in order. I think they’re going to do a search for his replacement and they’re going to do it fast. I’m going to tell them they had better look at you.”

“OK,” I said. “Thank you.”

“But also,” he went on, “you need to publish something. Everybody’s obsessed with publication right now. Has your grandmother told you a lot of cool shit about the USSR?”

“No.”

“Well, think of something else, then. You need to get a publication. That’ll help you a lot.”