Keith Gessen - A Terrible Country

Her ninetieth birthday was coming up. I wasn’t sure how she felt about celebrating it but a few days after the blowup with Dima she turned to me and said, “You know, I’m about to turn one hundred.”

“Well, almost,” I said. “You’re about to turn ninety.”

“How’s that?” she said.

“Well, what year were you born?”

“In 1919.”

“And now it’s 2009. So that makes you ninety.”

My grandmother looked at me, unconvinced. “Maybe,” she said.

Either way, it seemed like a big deal, and I decided we should throw a party. I made sure Emma Abramovna could come on that day, and I invited Yulia and her roommates, our reading group, and Sergei, as well as the soldiers. “I have invited some people to come over on your birthday,” I told my grandmother.

“You have? But how will we feed them?”

“Seraphima Mikhailovna will make a nice meal for them,” I said.

My grandmother agreed, but she did not quite agree. The next day, in the late morning, she started getting dressed to go out. “I need to get some things for the birthday party,” she said.

“Like what?”

“All sorts of things,” said my grandmother.

I decided to go with her, and together we walked to the market. The ground was a little wet still from the melting snow but the sun was out. It was nice.

At the market my grandmother headed for the baked goods. “Do you think the guests want this pie?” she said, pointing to her favorite poppy-seed pie.

“Maybe,” I said. “But the party is two weeks away. Why don’t we buy it a little closer to then, so it’s fresher?”

“Let’s buy it now so we don’t have to worry about it,” said my grandmother.

I decided not to argue. And the next day I did not accompany her as she went again to get more birthday supplies; I watched her from her bedroom window as she slowly but surely made her way, sometimes leaning on her cane and other times ignoring it, out of the courtyard and toward the market. The birthday party was inspiring my grandmother to leave the house—I wasn’t going to argue with that, even if some of the things she was bringing back—for example, grapes—were not going to make it. Sometimes I ended up eating the food she bought; other times she would eat it herself, forgetting why she’d bought it. I began to think of it as more of a two-week birthday feast than a waste of energy.

And why not? You only turn ninety once. Especially if you think you’re turning one hundred. When the day of the party finally arrived I got up in the morning and sent out a reminder email to all the guests; I also called and talked with Emma Abramovna and her caretaker, Valya, to make sure they were still coming. (By this point Emma Abramovna had received numerous calls on the subject from my grandmother. “I’m turning one hundred,” my grandmother would say. Pause. “No, I am. I did the math.” Another pause. “Are you sure? Well, how old are you?” Emma Abramovna was eighty-seven. “Really?” said my grandmother, surprised. She couldn’t be thirteen years older than Emma Abramovna.)

After emailing everyone, I ate some breakfast and began doing the dishes. I noticed that the water wasn’t draining. This had happened before but it had responded well to my jamming it with a plunger. I did this now and it seemed to get better, but when I went into the bathroom, the sink there wasn’t draining. They were connected, these sinks, and I had merely shifted the problem from one to the other.

I now plungered the bathroom sink. The water drained but when I returned to the kitchen, it didn’t drain again. At this point my grandmother came into the kitchen and saw that something was wrong.

“Andryush, what’s the matter?”

“The sink is clogged. But we’ll unclog it.”

“Do you know how?”

“Yes,” I said, and went into my room. I did not know how. It was now ten o’clock. Seraphima Mikhailovna was coming at noon, and the guests at five. We were in trouble.

I called Dima’s handyman, Stepan. He picked up on the second ring. “I’m in Irkutsk,” he said, “visiting family. You’re an educated person, you’ll figure it out. There’s a snake under the sink. Use that.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“No problem,” said Stepan, and hung up.

Stepan’s confidence in me, however ironic, propelled me back into the kitchen. My grandmother had taken a seat and was now preparing to watch me defeat the clog.

I had noticed, a few times while going under the sink to fetch a rag to wipe the floor, that there was a device back there that looked like a thick, coiled wire, which I thought might be a sink implement of some kind. I took it out now. It was a coiled wire with a kind of winding mechanism. This was the snake: you stuck it in the sink and wound it until it came up against your clog. But the kitchen sink drain was covered by a metal grate that was soldered to the sink bottom—I couldn’t get the snake in there. Was there another way in? I went, again, under the sink. The water drained into the wall through segmented plastic pipes. There was a pipe running straight down from the sink, which connected to a U-shaped pipe, which in turn connected to a pipe that ran into the wall. Three pipes in all. But why would they make the water travel through a U—that is, down and then up again—before going into the wall? Maybe that was the problem—the U was blocked? At least the U looked like it would come off; it was attached to the other two pipes with round coupling nuts. I tried them. Lefty loosey—they turned. I undid one nut, and the U-shaped segment detached, ever so slightly, from the pipe going into the wall. Now I unscrewed the other nut—and just like that the U-shaped pipe came off! Suddenly a cascade of water came down onto me from the sink pipe—I jumped back and out of the space and spilled water from the U-shaped pipe. The water was nasty, brackish. I took my U-shaped pipe and dumped it in the toilet. Then I came back and started rounding up rags to clean up the spill.

My grandmother was aghast. “How horrible!” she said. “How terrible. What are we going to do? We’re finished. Are we finished?”

I tried not to lose my cool. After all, my grandmother wasn’t wrong. I was covered in filth and I had just dismembered the sink without any clear plan of action. I was ignorant of plumbing. I was ignorant of the entire physical world! I lived in an apartment, but how had they built this apartment? What materials were in it? Why did it keep out the cold? How did heat enter it? How did water? And where did the water from the sink go after it made it through those plastic pipes?

“Andryush,” said my grandmother, “should we cancel the party?”

I looked at my worried grandmother. She had stopped dressing up at home and mostly wore her worn-out pink robe. But she still wanted to have a party, I could see this. “We’re OK,” I lied. “I know what I’m doing. Give me an hour, OK? If I don’t fix this in an hour, we can cancel the party.”

My grandmother agreed and went to lie down in her room. I returned to the sink.

I had been reading Marx—a man who tried to examine every minute piece of socioeconomic detail in order to discover the laws whereby capitalist society functioned. But was there a Marx of the physical world? There was, actually: Newton. In the seventeenth century, Newton had discovered the basic laws of motion: inertia, gravity, every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Where previously people had simply seen things fall, now they could understand why they fell. In fact it was less that Newton was the Marx of the physical world than that Marx was trying to be the Newton of the social world. Had he succeeded? Maybe not. The laws of economics were more complicated than the laws of motion.