Keith Gessen - A Terrible Country

“No, it’s not.”

“Of course it is! It’s a restaurant.”

“This isn’t a fancy restaurant. It’s more like a cafeteria.”

“Oh, a cafeteria .” She pictured a large spacious room, picking up a tray and getting some kasha and kotlety and soup ladled onto your plate, like in an American prison. “OK.”

So later that day we went to the cafeteria. It was a five-minute walk down Bolshaya Lubyanka, maybe six, and as we made our way my grandmother oohed and aahed as we tried not to slip on the ice. I held her tightly by the arm, and she began gingerly to make use of her cane. We walked by an art gallery that had recently appeared, and some girls were outside, with their coats off, smoking. “Look at those girls,” said my grandmother loudly, of the scantily clad smokers. “They’re not wearing any clothes!” She was weaker and had a limp but she was at least getting her spirit back.

I kept my head down and finally we were there. We navigated the step up into the Coffee Grind, the pretty barista greeted us brightly from across the room, as she greeted everyone, and I guided my grandmother to a seat. It was strange to be here with her—I felt nervous, as though, if she didn’t like it, the Grind would fall in my esteem. I had to make sure she didn’t see the prices, so I asked her to stay put while I got some food. She agreed. I ordered a pot of tea, two little cabbage pies, and two tuna sandwiches. It cost twenty-five dollars. I paid quickly and shoved the change in my pocket. My grandmother, back at our table, hadn’t noticed the prices. Then, to my surprise, she ate her food without any complaint. Perhaps at the hospital her high standards had been slightly adjusted down.

“Andryush,” she said, as we drank our tea after the meal. “You are a good person. You’re not going to stay here, are you?”

“In what sense?” I wasn’t sure what she wanted to hear.

“In this country. Don’t stay in this country. It’s a terrible country. Good people become bad people, or bad things happen to them.”

She bent over slowly and sipped at the tea, which was still hot. Sometimes, when her tea was too hot, she would pour it out into a dish to cool it down, and sip it from the dish. She did so now.

“Did I ever tell you about Leva’s company?” she said.

“A little,” I said.

“He had a wonderful idea, and he made a company with his friends,” she said. “They were people he trusted. And then”—I saw her struggling to remember—“something bad happened.” She couldn’t remember the story, but she remembered its lessons. “He trusted them and they betrayed him,” she said. “That’s what happened.”

I nodded. It was, basically, what had happened, and in addition to everything else it saddened me that this is what my grandmother spent her final years thinking about.

“So,” my grandmother concluded, “don’t stay in this country. It’s a terrible country.”

She finished drinking her tea and leaned back a little in her chair. Yes, I thought, it’s a terrible country a lot of the time, but here we were, across the street from the KGB no less, and it wasn’t so bad. You could find little oases here, little islands of peace. Then, before I could think of a way to stop her, my grandmother took out her teeth and put them in the dish where the tea had been. I’d never seen her do this in public, though of course we’d hardly ever eaten out together. I glanced around the Coffee Grind; I had put us at a corner table, out of the way of things, and no one seemed to be paying attention. I relaxed.

We sat in contented silence for a while. My grandmother had lost a lot of weight at the hospital, and she was pale. Well, we’d take care of that! Eventually I cleared our plates. As I deposited them at the counter, I heard a wail behind me. I turned to see a little boy, about age three, with his mother; they had been sitting at an angle to us but now, as the mother was getting the boy dressed to leave, he saw my grandmother and her teeth and was pointing at them. “Mama,” he was yelling, terrified, “what happened to her teeth?” I turned to my grandmother. She couldn’t understand why he was screaming and was making toothless faces at him to try to cheer him up. She loved little kids. The more she made faces at him, the harder the boy cried. I didn’t know what to do; I walked back to my grandmother and then stood helplessly beside her. The mother gave me a reproachful look as she finally finished dressing the boy and picked him up and out of the Coffee Grind. Oblivious, my grandmother put her teeth back into her mouth and announced that it was time to go.

As we made our way slowly out the door, the pretty barista who had greeted us approached and, speaking quietly enough that my grandmother couldn’t hear, told me not to bring her back again.

My grandmother nodded politely at her. “Thank you very much,” she said.

On a parallel track, I was indignant. “I come in here every day and you’re telling me I can’t bring my grandmother?”

The barista was unfazed. “We need to keep up certain standards here. And as for you, I’m sorry, you come in every day and buy the cheapest item on the menu and then sit for five hours with your computer.”

This was low. “You know what?” I said. “I won’t be troubling you anymore.”

“So be it,” said the barista, and bowed slightly.

“And your cappuccinos are inedible.”

She bowed again, though I did see some color come to her face.

I turned my head and walked out with my grandmother.

“Andryusha,” she said, once we were in the street. “Thank you for that lunch. For supper we can have some cottage cheese with jam. But what will we do tomorrow?”

I was seething. My grandmother should not have taken her teeth out, it’s true. But it’s not like she came in every day and took out her teeth. This was an emergency. And as for my sitting there for five hours, that was also true. But it was the purpose of a café that people could sit there for a while! Ahhh!

“Andryush,” my grandmother said again. “What will we do tomorrow?”

“I’m going to cook,” I said roughly.

“Do you know how?” said my grandmother.

“You’re going to teach me.”

“OK,” said my grandmother, and patted me a little nervously on the arm.

We walked back up Bolshaya Lubyanka. “You know,” said my grandmother, “that is the big scary building.” She gestured to the KGB headquarters across the street. “But this”—she gestured to a small, cute, green nineteenth-century building to our left—“is where they carried out most of the executions.”

“Really?” I said. I’d always assumed it was the big building across the street.

“Yes,” said my grandmother matter-of-factly. “Bolshaya Lubyanka Eleven. This is it.”

And we kept walking.

I got up the next morning to a worried grandmother. “Andryush,” she said, “what are we going to do?” I reminded her that I was going to be cooking and proceeded to make us some eggs and instant coffee. But of course more generally she was right. Even if we did find something to eat, what were we going to do ? In general. With our lives. I didn’t know.

I had never learned to cook. This hadn’t felt like a moral failing on my part; now it did. Many factors had conspired to create this failing in me. I had spent much of my life in universities, with their cafeterias and pizza nights and free sandwiches in exchange for attending someone’s lecture. I had lived in New York, where you could always buy a hot dog or chicken on a stick, and if you were in a part of town where the guys charged too much, you could bargain with them. I had dated girls who cooked, and when there was no one else to cook and I didn’t have enough money to buy a sandwich, I went to the store and bought a can of chickpeas and a can of tuna and a packet of pasta. Chickpeas plus tuna plus some olive oil was a salad; pasta plus butter was an entrée. In this way I would feed myself. But of course I could never feed someone else this way. I had never had to.