Keith Gessen - A Terrible Country

“Nice to meet you, Andryusha!” Vladlenna hollered from her bed. She was holding some kind of yellow half-knit object in her lap and working on it as she spoke. She weighed two hundred pounds if she weighed anything. “Seva,” she hollered, “is this guy married?”

“I’m afraid not,” my grandmother said.

“Well, we’ll take right care of that!” said Vladlenna. “I know lots of girls!” And she cackled. I smiled politely. The truth was, if it weren’t for the recent advent of Yulia, I’d probably have asked Vladlenna for some phone numbers.

My grandmother had been changed into a green hospital gown, and there was still a bandage on the back of her head. I couldn’t tell if it was fresh or not. Other than that, she looked OK. She still had her strength. She smiled when she saw me.

“How is the food here?” I asked.

My grandmother shook her head, as if to indicate that the food was unspeakably bad.

“It’s pretty good!” Vladlenna shouted from her side of the room. “This morning they gave us oatmeal with jam and some nice tea!”

“Is that true?” I asked my grandmother.

She looked confused. “You know,” she said, “I don’t remember.”

“Ha!” Vladlenna said. “I’m not saying it was the most memorable thing that’s ever happened and we all need to remember it for the rest of our lives. Ha-ha!”

I sat with them for a while and then went and found the cafeteria. I ate a bowl of borscht and a plate of kasha and kotlety, all for about three dollars, and bought some small pies they had by the cash register to take up to my grandmother and Vladlenna. I stayed until eight, alternately hanging out, working on my laptop while my grandmother napped, and exchanging pleasantries with Vladlenna. Then I started on the long, cold ride home.

And so it was every day. I was able to get some work done in the morning, get on the subway to the bus, and then spend the remainder of the time (it took almost two hours to reach the hospital) with my grandmother and her roommate. The CT scan showed no internal bleeding, but they proceeded to do the whole raft of other neurological tests, as they said, “while they had her.” All these came back negative. My grandmother was in good health.

“Are you sure?” I asked the doctor when, on the final day, he delivered this report to me. I said, “She’s always forgetting things. Basic things.”

“How old is she?”

“Eighty-nine.”

“Exactly right. She has medium-stage dementia, which for her age, after the life she’s led—it’s good. It’s above average.”

“There’s nothing she could take? She’s pretty depressed.”

When questioned by the doctor earlier about these very symptoms, I had underplayed them. But now that he was giving her a perfectly clean bill of health, I wanted to argue.

“You live in America, is that right?” said the doctor.

I nodded.

“I know that in America they prescribe medication for this sort of thing. Maybe they’re right to do so. But these are powerful drugs. They have side effects. Here, we’re more careful. My advice is to keep your grandmother as mentally engaged as you can. Talk to her. Argue with her. Her memory is going to disappear, but you can slow that down. And she can still enjoy her family. She can still enjoy the outdoors. These drugs can slow some of the processes but they might break something else in her brain or body—I would avoid them.” The doctor nodded, as if to say, “Enough.” He had never said so many words to me at once, and I was surprised and grateful. “ Vot tak, ” he said. “So that’s that.” “Good luck.” And he reached out his hand for me to shake.

All this for a hundred dollars.

It was time to go home. I called a cab and went to fetch my grandmother, who was now dressed in her ordinary clothes again, and helped her up out of bed.

She nearly collapsed in my arms. The nurse was there and saw it. “She’s been lying in bed for a week,” she said. “It’ll be a little while before she gets her strength back. But she will.”

We said good-bye to Vladlenna, who handed us a piece of paper with her phone number on it, and I supported my grandmother down the hall and to the elevator. The young doctor came out to say good-bye to us. “It’s been a pleasure having you, Seva Efraimovna,” he said.

“Thank you,” she said, beaming.

They seemed to have genuinely cared for her and were sorry to see her go.

But a terrible thing had happened. Forcing an elderly woman who was used to walking several miles a day, even if only back and forth through her apartment, to lie in bed for such a long stretch of time was hugely destructive. They had meant her no harm! But my grandmother came in with a mild head injury and left with a limp. On our way out we bought her a cane in the hospital shop.

In the cab, I asked my grandmother when she intended to call her new friend Vladlenna.

“That woman?” said my grandmother. “I’m not going to call her. She’s an anti-Semite.”

“What? How do you know?”

“I know,” said my grandmother. “I could tell by the way she said ‘Seva Efraimovna.’ Let me see her phone number.”

I handed her the little sheet. My grandmother crumpled it up and then, before I could stop her, rolled down her window a little bit and threw it out.

“Hey!” said the driver. “If they pull me over you’re paying the ticket.”

My grandmother didn’t hear him. As for me, I was in shock.

“Did you hear me?” said the driver.

“Yes,” I said. “Don’t worry about it.”

We drove on. My grandmother had outlived all her friends, but that didn’t mean she was in the market for new ones.

THROUGHOUT THE TIME my grandmother was in the hospital I had not seen Yulia. We had texted a bit—I’d never texted in Russian before, and I enjoyed it; I’d gotten a cheap Russian phone after my Samsung started acting up, and it corrected my spelling—but it wasn’t like I was going to drag her to the hospital, and I had no time for anything else. On the bus to and from the hospital I had spun out numerous fantasies about our next date, but as soon as my grandmother returned I was confronted with another problem.

The morning after we got back I woke up to find my grandmother in the kitchen, slowly grating an apple, as usual. I kissed her on the back of her perfectly healed head, which still had a little bandage on it.

“Oh, Andryush,” said my grandmother, twisting around. The cane we’d bought at the hospital was leaning up against the wall next to her chair. She said, “What are we going to do?”

“What do you mean?”

“What are we going to eat?”

“I can make breakfast,” I said.

“And for lunch?”

“For lunch we’ll go to a café.” I decided this on the spot. We’d go to the Coffee Grind! It would be a wonderful opportunity for my grandmother to get some exercise, and also to see where I spent so much time, and for lunch she could eat one of their tuna sandwiches. The other time we’d stopped at a café, on one of our walks, she’d declared the food inedible, but maybe the Grind would be different. It was too expensive to be a long-term solution, but it would get us through the day, and then tomorrow I could cook.

“A café?” said my grandmother incredulously. The way she said it I could tell she was thinking of a short counter, a couple of tables, maybe an espresso machine. “They won’t have anything to eat at a café.”

“It’s more like a restaurant. We’re going to a restaurant.”

“A restaurant?” Now she was thinking of a banquet hall, a meal with multiple courses, lots of vodka, loud music, probably dancing. It was something you went to once a year, for a birthday or wedding. “That’s very expensive.”