Keith Gessen - A Terrible Country

She wanted to feed me. Slowly and deliberately she heated potato soup, kotlety (Russian meatballs), and sliced fried potatoes. She moved around the kitchen at a glacial pace and was unsteady on her feet, but there were many things to hold on to in that old kitchen, and she knew exactly where they were. She couldn’t talk and cook at the same time, and her hearing had deterioriated, so I waited while she finished, and then helped her plate the food. Finally, we sat. She asked me about my life in America. “Where do you live?” “New York.” “What?” “New York.” “Oh. Do you live in a house or an apartment?” “An apartment.” “What?” “An apartment.” “Do you own it?” “I rent it. With some roommates.” “What?” “I share it. It’s like a communal apartment.” “Are you married?” “No.” “No?” “No.” “Do you have kids?” “No.” “No kids?” “No. In America,” I half lied, “people don’t have kids until later.” Satisfied, or partly satisfied, she then asked me how long I intended to stay. “Until Dima comes back,” I said. “What?” she said. “Until Dima comes back,” I said again.

“Andryusha,” she said now. “Do you know my friend Musya?”

“Yes,” I said. Emma Abramovna, or Musya, was her oldest and closest friend.

“She’s a very close friend of mine,” my grandmother explained. “And right now, she’s at her dacha.” Emma Abramovna, a literature professor who had managed to hang on at Moscow State despite the anti-Jewish campaign, had a dacha at Peredelkino, the old writers’ colony. My grandmother had lost her own dacha in the nineties, under circumstances I was never quite clear about.

“I think,” she said now, “that next summer she’s going to invite me to stay with her.”

“Yes? She said that?”

“No,” said my grandmother. “But I hope she does.”

“That sounds good,” I said. In August, Muscovites all leave for their dachas; clearly my grandmother’s inability to leave for her dacha was weighing on her mind.

We had now finished our food and our tea, and my grandmother casually reached into her mouth and took out her teeth. She put them in a little teacup on the table. “I need to rest my gums,” she said toothlessly.

“Of course,” I said. Without her teeth to hold them up my grandmother’s lips collapsed a little, and without her teeth to strike her tongue against she spoke with a slight lisp.

“Tell me,” she said now, in the same exploratory tone as earlier. “Do you know Dima?”

“Of course,” I said. “He’s my brother.”

“Oh.” My grandmother sighed, as if she couldn’t entirely trust someone who knew Dima. “Do you know where he is?”

“He’s in London,” I said.

“He never comes to see me,” said my grandmother.

“That’s not true.”

“No, it is. Once he got me to sign over the apartment, he hasn’t been interested in me at all.”

“Grandma!” I said. “That’s definitely not true.” It was true that a few years earlier Dima had put the apartment in his name—under post-Soviet-style gentrification, little old ladies who owned prime Moscow real estate tended to have all sorts of misfortunes befall them. From a safety perspective it was the right move. But I could see now that from my grandmother’s perspective it looked suspicious.

“What’s not true?” she said.

“It’s not true that he doesn’t have any interest in you. He talks to me about you all the time.”

“Hmm,” said my grandmother, unconvinced. Then she sighed again. She started to get up to try to put away the plates, but I implored her to sit, less in that moment because I wanted to help than because she did everything so slowly. I quickly cleared the table and started doing the dishes. As I was finishing, my grandmother came over and made to ask a question that I could tell she thought might be a little delicate.

“Andryusha,” she said. “You are such a dear person to me. To our whole family. But I can’t remember right now. How did we come to know you?”

I was momentarily speechless.

“I’m your grandson,” I said. There was an element of pleading in my voice.

“What?”

“I’m your grandson.”

“My grandson,” she repeated.

“You had a daughter, do you remember?”

“Yes,” she said uncertainly, and then remembered. “Yes. My little daughter.” She thought a moment longer. “She went to America,” said my grandmother. “She went to America and died.”

“That’s right,” I said. My mother had died of breast cancer in 1992; the first time my grandmother saw her after our emigration was at her funeral.

“And you—” she said now.

“I’m her son.”

My grandmother took this in. “Then why did you come here?” she said.

I didn’t understand.

“This is a terrible country. My Yolka took you to America. Why did you come back?” She seemed angry.

I was again at a loss for words. Why had I come? Because Dima had asked me to. And because I wanted to help my grandmother. And because I thought it would help me find a topic for an article, which would then help me get a job. These reasons swirled through my mind like an argument and I decided to go with the one that seemed most practical. “For work,” I said. “I need to do some research.”

“Oh,” she said. “All right.” She too had had to work in this terrible country, and she could understand.

Momentarily satisfied, my grandmother excused herself and went to her room to lie down.

I remained in the kitchen, drinking another cup of tea. Throughout the apartment were photos of our family, and especially my mother—on walls, on dressers, on bookshelves. In America our family had become scattered; in Moscow it was exactly where it had always been.

Holy shit, I thought. This was not the state in which I had expected to find my grandmother. Dima said she was on medication for her dementia, but I hadn’t really understood.

My first thought was: I am not qualified. I am not qualified to care for an eighty-nine-year-old woman who can’t remember who I am. I was a person who had indulged in an unthinkable amount of schooling and then failed to convert that schooling into an actual job. “I just don’t see where this is going,” Sarah had said at the Starbucks.

“Why does it have to go somewhere?” I said, lamely.

She just shook her head. “I may regret this,” she said. “But I doubt it.” And she was right. I was an idiot, like Dima said. And I was in over my head. That first day, in the kitchen, was the first time, the first of many, that I would decide to leave.

In my mind I began composing an email. “Dima,” it went, “I feel that you misled me about the condition our grandmother is in. Or maybe I misunderstood you. I can’t handle this. I’m sorry. Let’s hire someone who knows what they’re doing. I’ll help pay for it.” And then I’d go back to New York. There’s no shame in knowing your limitations. Though how exactly I’d help pay for it was a mystery. After buying my visa and my ticket, I had less than one thousand dollars to my name.

My grandmother came out of her room and crossed the foyer to the toilet. She had gone to bed, clearly, and then gotten up again: her hair was mussed and she was still without her teeth. Seeing me, she gave a toothless smile and a wave. I felt like she knew who I was in that moment. I calmed down.

So I was to keep her company. Maybe even an idiot could do that. Who cared if she couldn’t remember certain things? Her life had been so wonderful, such a parade of joys, that she should sit around remembering everything about it? She wouldn’t be able to tell me the story of her life for my would-be article, but I’d find something else to write about. And maybe she wouldn’t know who I was all the time. I knew who I was, and I could remind her. I was the youngest son of her daughter, her lone child, my mother, who had gone to America and died. I got up and washed my teacup and headed for my bedroom.