Keith Gessen - A Terrible Country

“You know,” he said very quietly, “they don’t get paid very much.”

“Oh!” I said. I pulled out my wallet and found five hundred rubles and handed them to the paramedic who’d sat in back with me.

“Thank you,” he said, and finally left.

In the examination room the young doctor checked the back of my grandmother’s head, shone a light in her eyes, and asked her some questions. When it was done he told her and me that she was safe for the moment but that it would be wise to keep an eye on her and run some tests while she was here.

“What do you think, Seva Efraimovna?” he asked her gently.

My grandmother turned to me. “Whatever Andryusha thinks is best,” she said.

I straightened up. “Would we be able to go home tomorrow?” I asked.

“No,” said the doctor. “This will take a week.”

“A week ?” In America, I would have been concerned about the cost; in Russia, it was something else. The medical care was free. But I was concerned about leaving my grandmother for such a long time. I looked around the room, with its tall ceiling and chipped blue paint. I was concerned about leaving her here.

The doctor followed my gaze. “It doesn’t look like much but this is a decent hospital,” he said. “But I can’t force you to keep her here. Sometimes the cranial bleeding from a fall like this doesn’t show up right away. But of course there may not be any bleeding. It’s up to you.”

I felt the pressure of medical expertise. If she dies, or suffers brain damage, or is otherwise hampered in her functioning, he was saying, because you thought that our peeling paint meant that we didn’t know anything about medicine—it’ll be on you, not me.

“Grandma,” I said, “do you want to stay here a little while so they can run some tests?”

“OK,” said my grandmother. “If you think I should, I will.”

I didn’t know what to think. But I also felt like I had no other choice. “I do,” I said.

“Then OK.”

“OK,” said the doctor. “Visiting hours are noon to eight. I’ll have a nurse bring her to her room.”

And he left us. A few minutes later a nurse came in with a wheelchair and with my help put my grandmother in it and wheeled her to a bed in a large room down the hall. The lights inside the room were dimmed; there was a curtain, on the other side of which appeared to be another bed and, it seemed, another patient. At the nurse’s signal we lifted my grandmother from the wheelchair to the bed. She was incredibly light.

The nurse was a big blond woman in her forties. She was careful with my grandmother and seemed to know what she was doing. After we put my grandmother in bed, she left.

My grandmother had been awake but subdued since we’d arrived. I now took out her toiletries and extra clothes and placed them on her bedside table. I also wrote down my phone number. “I will be back tomorrow,” I said.

“OK,” she said. “Do you have the key to my apartment?”

“I do.”

“Good. There is still some soup left over—make sure you eat it.”

“OK,” I said. I kissed her on the forehead and left.

The metro was closed by the time I got out of there and I had to get a cab home. It cost twenty-five dollars. When I returned to the empty apartment I cleaned up the mess I’d made when I packed, put on the potato soup to heat up, and opened my computer. In the Gchat bar, Dima’s little green light was on. I messaged him.

“Grandma’s in the hospital,” I said.

He wrote back right away. “What??”

“She fell down the stairs and hit her head. The doctor says it’s not dangerous.”

“Where were you when this happened?”

“I was in the apartment.”

“I told you about those stairs!”

I didn’t say anything to that.

“Are you home now?” asked Dima.

“Yes.”

“I’ll call you.”

A minute later the phone rang.

“Which hospital is she in?” said Dima.

“Neurological Clinic Number Eight,” I said. I had taken a card with me and studied it. “It’s way out at the end of the Kiev highway.”

“Fuck!” said Dima. “That’s a state hospital. They have private hospitals now where you can get decent care.”

I didn’t say anything. Of course I’d had no idea. Probably I should have called Dima right away, but everything had happened so quickly.

“Can you move her?” Dima said.

“This place is OK,” I said. “It’s not bad. And it’s devoted to neurology.”

“Move her to the American Clinic,” said Dima. “It’s right near Prospekt Mira. You’ll be able to walk there.”

“How much does it cost?”

“I’ll pay for it,” said Dima.

“I’ll think about it,” I said. I didn’t want to put my grandmother back in an ambulance for two hours while she still had a head wound. And I didn’t want Dima paying for her.

“If you keep her at this place at least give the doctor some money,” he said. “Give him three thousand rubles.” A hundred dollars. “And give the nurse five hundred. It’ll help.”

“OK,” I said.

“You had one thing to do,” said Dima. “You had one fucking thing you were supposed to do.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Unbelievable,” said Dima, and hung up.

My soup had partly boiled out of the saucepan. I ate what remained and spent an hour online reading about head trauma. Then I went to bed. It was the first time in my life I’d had the family apartment all to myself. I slept badly.

Over the course of the next week the hospital tested my grandmother for every manner of neurological ailment. They took her through machines, hooked her up to monitors, and told her to read letters and numbers from a big board. She did it all obediently; she was relieved that someone finally thought she was sick.

I spent that week on the bus that ran from in front of the hospital to the nearest metro station and back. The bus did not seem to keep a regular schedule, and often in the interest of getting out of the cold I boarded it going in the wrong direction, since there was only one bus on the route and it would be coming back in my direction anyway. It was warmer on the bus than it was outside, though never quite warm enough.

I decided not to move my grandmother. She was comfortable in her room, and the staff was attentive. I was nervous about paying money to the doctor but it worked out. I had been unable to find any unused envelopes in my grandmother’s apartment and so folded my three 1,000-ruble bills into a ripped-out page from one of my notebooks; this looked pretty ridiculous and when I caught the doctor in his little office and thrust it at him, he demurred. But I insisted. “Please,” I said. Finally he agreed and, opening the top drawer of his desk, stuffed the makeshift envelope inside. “It’s unnecessary,” he said, looking at me with dignity, “but thank you.”

And that was that. No receipt, no exchange of goods, and afterward I went back to my grandmother’s room. But the payment worked, at least for me. I felt like I had bought a small part of the hospital. I was no longer a stranger there. And after I paid off the nurses too I noticed that my grandmother had an extra blanket and that they rolled a television into her room.

My grandmother’s neighbor turned out to be a garrulous woman named Vladlenna. She was just a few years younger than my grandmother but large where my grandmother was small and loud where my grandmother was quiet. On the morning of my first visit I found my grandmother in bed and Vladlenna regaling her with tales of her health. “Oh, Vladlenna Viktorovna, this is my grandson Andrei,” said my grandmother.