Keith Gessen - A Terrible Country

I sat down at the table with her and started going through the books. They were written in her large, round hand. Many names and numbers were crossed out. I asked after a few of them. “She died.” “They emigrated.” “I don’t know.” I stopped asking. We had only Alla Aaronovna’s name and patronymic, not her last name, so I had to flip through the entirety of each book. There were two crossed-out Allas, but both had died (there were dates), and neither was an Aaronovna.

“Are you sure that was her name?”

I was becoming less sure, but still I was sure. I had written it down right away.

My grandmother continued to look through the books. Finally she said, “There’s an Ella Petrovna. Maybe it was her.”

“It wasn’t her.”

“I’m going to call her. Maybe it was.”

She dialed the number. The person who answered knew neither an Ella Petrovna nor an Alla Aaronovna. My grandmother apologized. Then, very carefully, as someone does when dealing with the dead, she crossed out the name and number in her book.

“You see,” said my grandmother, “all my friends have died. Everyone close to me has died. I have no one left.”

“I’m sure she’ll call again,” I said hopefully.

She never did.

When all this was done I took my notebook out of my book bag and cross-checked the list of medicines Dima had sent me with the ones on the shelf. The empty bottle, it turned out, was a vitamin D supplement. Her dementia pill bottle was half full. So it was not the medicine. This was her.

I opened the bag of poppy-seed sushki and, sitting there in the kitchen, ate the entire thing.

For the next week, I didn’t let my grandmother out of my sight. I went with her on her grocery rounds and kept her company while she cooked. I sneaked down to the KGB to work while she took her morning nap, but then I’d be back again. I was having trouble overcoming my jet lag, and found myself very sleepy in the late afternoons, but did my best to accompany her on walks. In the early evenings we ate supper, which was heavy on tea and sweets, and watched the evening news.

Physically, for an eighty-nine-year-old woman, my grandmother was in good shape. She and Uncle Lev had spent years going on interminable walks around the particle accelerator in Dubna and hiking through the mountains of the USSR. This was fashionable among the scientific set, and also he had to travel the vast empire for work, to learn if there was oil under the ground. Even now my grandmother took walks through the apartment, back and forth from one end to the other, like a prisoner. But her mind was failing. After some emails with Dima and a few hours on WebMD I concluded that she had regular old dementia. (A few weeks later Dima got us an appointment with a neurologist; the neurologist confirmed this.) The grooves of her memory were shot. Her personality was slowly disappearing. All the while her heart beat like a perfect little engine. Her body was outliving her mind.

Her days were strictly regimented. She awoke each morning at seven, grated an apple (for her digestion), took her medicines, made her bed, and dressed. Like all Soviet people she had spent her life with limited space, and now each morning she removed her bedding and placed it in the drawers underneath her bed, thereby converting her bed into something more like a sofa. She still took care of her appearance, with a rotation of two pairs of pleated, light-green khaki-style pants and several pastel-colored collared shirts. She had a blue cotton hat that she wore to keep off the sun. These feminine touches were the ones that had, once upon a time, kept her from being lonely even in the postwar years, when most of the men didn’t return from the war and the ones who did could choose just about any girl they liked. It was a tough dating scene for a woman, and yet my grandmother had done OK.

She still did her own grocery shopping, going on a tour of the stores (and a “market,” as she called it, which consisted of six plastic kiosks on an empty lot) within a two-block radius. Most of the neighborhood had undergone radical gentrification, with restaurants and clothing boutiques and banks muscling out the depressing Soviet-era groceries, but a few remained, and she went from one to the next to the next. Eggs were cheaper in one place, cheese in another, a beet salad with too much mayonnaise that she liked in a third. For special items we ranged a little farther. “Do you want chicken for lunch?” my grandmother said one morning. I said sure. So we walked ten minutes down Sretenka to the Sukharevskaya metro stop, where there was a rotisserie chicken stand run by some Azeri dudes. My grandmother ordered a half chicken. They handed it to her in a little paper bag.

The grocery run wasn’t always smooth—I caught, or thought I caught, one of the saleswomen shortchanging my grandmother by eighty rubles—and because most of the groceries were Soviet style, that is, you had to ask for everything from behind the counter and then pay at the register and then come back with your receipt and get your items, and because my grandmother went from place to place to place to get the best prices, and because she did everything slowly, it took much, much longer than it needed to. At the end of it, she needed help getting up the stairs to the second floor. Still, that she was able to do so much by herself was a triumph.

Aside from Emma Abramovna, still ensconced at her enviable dacha, my grandmother had, as she told me over and over again, no friends: she had lost touch with them, they had moved with their children to Israel, they had died. One courtyard over from ours, there usually sat a little knot of old ladies—a few years younger than my grandmother, and much sturdier, thicker, cruder, dressed in cheap leisurewear, while my grandmother still dressed in cheap business attire—but when I asked my grandmother about them, as a way of introducing the concept of their potential friendship, she pulled me a little closer (we were walking by them) and said, “I used to sit with them. But then I stopped. They’re anti-Semites.” So it was down to me.

The evenings were simple enough: we’d watch the nightly news and play anagrams, where you pick some large word out of a book, write it on a sheet of paper, and then try to form out of its letters the maximum number of different words. You got one point for a word with four letters, two points for a word with five, and so on. My grandmother loved this game, was ruthless at it, and typically beat me about 60 to 8. So that was good. But before we got to anagrams and the evening news, we had to survive the late afternoon—the witching hour. This was the time my grandmother had the most trouble filling. She could no longer read for long stretches, as she once had done: sitting in a chair and looking down was hard on her back and neck, whereas lying in bed and holding up a book was too exhausting. She had taken to tearing out chapters of books, making it easier to hold them above her face as she lay in bed, but her memory was so bad that she had trouble enjoying anything of any length. Over the course of those first few weeks I saw her read the same Chekhov story—torn out of a paperback edition of his stories—over and over again. Aside from reading, there wasn’t much my grandmother knew how to do inside the house to entertain herself. She had lived a difficult life and had never really learned how to take her leisure. There’d always been too much to do. Now there wasn’t, and on these long afternoons she would become bored and even desperate if there was nowhere to go. But going somewhere wasn’t easy.

Moscow was enormous. It had always been enormous. Stalin had widened the avenues to the point where you needed underground passageways to get from one side to the other. My little grandmother had to go down a flight of stairs, walk through a passageway, then up some stairs again, just to cross the street. If she wanted to cross back she’d have to do it all over again.