Keith Gessen - A Terrible Country

My life was changed. I didn’t need to spend five hours at the Coffee Grind every day if I didn’t want to. I didn’t need to download everything before I left the Coffee Grind, or compose my various emails in a word processor at home and then cut and paste them into my Gmail once I was online again. Almost without noticing it, over the months I had developed an entire ad hoc system, held together with wire and string and my own nervous irritation, for communicating with the world. I could now discard it.

I still went to the Grind just about every day, but not for as long, and I began to spend hours sitting on a chair in the kitchen and working from the windowsill. This meant that I was around more. “Are you going to go to work?” my grandmother, now used to me doing so, asked one morning.

“I’m going to stay here,” I said, “if that’s OK?”

“Of course!” my grandmother said. She was very pleased.

But the windowsill internet also made me less attentive to my grandmother. My emails from students never seemed to end. And beyond that was the fact that there was so much I wanted to read. The October group had an email list that people were always sending things to—articles, proposals for protests, arguments. There was an anarchist, an associate of Shipalkin’s, who occasionally wrote in and accused the Octobrists of dictatorial tendencies, and a communist who wrote in and accused them of sectarianism. The long and sometimes interesting arguments would stretch out over days. I read them from the windowsill, munching on oatmeal cookies and sushki and drinking mug after mug of instant coffee, converting toward the end of the day to tea.

The night after Sergei’s party I was reading such an argument from the windowsill—I couldn’t now tell you what it was about—when my grandmother told me she was going for a walk. It was snowing out, a little, and slippery, I could see that, but it wasn’t too slippery. Despite the cold my grandmother had been out earlier in the day to get some groceries and had done fine. I felt like maybe I should go with her but I also wanted to continue reading. Was I just going to be trapped my whole life walking out with my grandmother whenever the notion struck her? That was no way to live. I went over and kissed her on the forehead and told her to have a good walk.

Not thirty minutes later I heard a sharp cry in the stairwell. At first I thought it was a dog or a child, but then I realized exactly who it was. I ran out onto the landing; my grandmother was lying at the bottom of the stairs. She was on her back, and her eyes were open, and she was holding the back of her head and looking at me, and she was scared. I went down the stairs—they were wet and slippery from people clomping snow onto them—and helped her up; her thick pink coat had cushioned the fall, but when I looked at the spot on the back of her head that she was holding, I saw there was blood. “Oh, Andryushenka,” she said as I slowly helped her up the stairs. “I’m so stupid. I’m so stupid. My head is spinning.”

I got her upstairs, helped her off with her stuff, lay her down on her bed, and then ran to my computer at the windowsill and looked up the emergency number for an ambulance. It was 03. I dialed it and explained that my grandmother had hit her head. The woman on the other end asked if I thought she was in danger. I had no idea. “Is she conscious?” the woman asked. I said yes. This apparently helped her make a determination as to where to send us. She said an ambulance would be there in twenty minutes, and it was.

In retrospect, I don’t know what I should have done. I’ve asked some doctors I’ve met, and some have said that a blow to the head such as the one my grandmother received when she fell might have been damaging but not life threatening; others have said that all sorts of dangerous bleeding could take place at her age, and that I was right to take her to the hospital. As I say, I don’t know. The ambulance came, two pale young guys in scrubs with a stretcher, and as they gently lay my grandmother on it they suggested I pack her some toiletries and changes of clothing and any books she’d liked to read. My grandmother had no travel bags that I knew of and so I went into my room and dumped the hockey stuff from my CПОРТ backpack and then filled it with some clothes and her toothbrush and glasses. Then we left.

I’ll never forget the view of Moscow I got from the back of that ambulance as we stopped and started through the traffic on the Garden Ring. After a while my grandmother fell asleep on the gurney next to me; one of the paramedics was sitting in the back with us, playing with his phone, and when I asked if it was all right for her to fall asleep he said yes. I watched the city out the back window. It was covered with a thin white layer of snow, the same snow that my grandmother had slipped on while I sat at my computer, reading my email. From inside the ambulance you could see how cold it was. People walked, in black coats and black hats and black shoes, trying to keep close to the buildings, for warmth. As we stood in traffic at one intersection I saw two cars get into a small fender bender. Without pause, the drivers jumped out and headed for each other. One of them was bigger but the smaller man was quicker; he delivered a couple of long hooks, the bigger guy grabbed his head in pain, and then it was over. They got back in their warm cars and waited for traffic to start moving again.

When we finally got off the Garden Ring and onto the Kiev highway, I asked the paramedic sitting with me how much longer it would take. “About an hour,” he said.

“An hour? There’s nothing closer?”

“They told us to route her to the neurological clinic,” he said, “because it’s a head injury. Don’t worry, it’s a good clinic.”

We kept going through the industrial neighborhoods and forests at the city’s southern edge. The hospital the ambulance finally arrived at was in the woods. In the dim lights of its driveway I could see an old, long, four-story yellow-brick building; given its distance from the city it might have been a village hospital from before the Revolution. Or after. Who knew. The paramedics carefully rolled my grandmother, covered with a warm blanket, off the ambulance and into the hospital. She was now awake. She did not seem disturbed by the proceedings; in fact, she seemed to like them. Her health had been troubling her. Now here were some people who were taking it seriously. “Thank you,” she kept saying to the paramedics. “Thank you.”

From inside, the hospital looked even older. A rickety elevator took us to the top floor and then we walked down a dimly lit corridor. It was getting late now, and most of the doors to the rooms were closed. Cheap old wooden chairs out in the hallway suggested that during the daytime there might have been visitors.

We arrived at an open door, where a young man in green hospital gear with dark circles under his eyes sat smoking a cigarette. This turned out to be the head neurologist. “Hello, Arkady Ivanovich,” one of my paramedics said. “Woman fell down, hit her head, there’s some minor bleeding. Dispatcher said we should take her to you.”

“Take her to examination room four-ten, please,” said the neurologist, and then followed us there.

I felt a little as my grandmother felt—it was a relief to have her and her health, finally, in the hands of professionals—but I was also apprehensive. This place was dirty and far from home. I wasn’t sure if I could trust these people. For reasons I didn’t understand, the paramedics hung around outside the doorway of the examination room even after they’d moved my grandmother to the examination table and repossessed their gurney. Noting this, the doctor looked from them to me.