A Terrible Country Page 4

  The women, I couldn’t help but notice, were exceptionally attractive. In the four blocks between the Coffee Grind and our house I must have seen a dozen very good-looking women. And there was something about them, about their uniformity. They were all thin, blonde, thirtyish, in black pencil skirts, white blouses, and high heels. I don’t know why I liked the fact that they all looked alike, but I did.

  The men too fit a pattern. Big, kasha fed, six feet tall, stuffed into expensive suits, balancing themselves on shiny, pointy-toed shoes, never smiling. Ten years ago you walked down a Moscow street and ran into a lot of thugs in cheap leather jackets. Those guys were gone now, replaced by these guys. Or maybe they were the same guys? They hogged the sidewalk; they barreled ahead without looking to see what was in the way; they kept their hands by their sides and their fists clenched, like they were ready to use them. I had just come from the land of dudes who grew beards, wore shorts, smiled always at some secret melody playing in their heads, and sipped their coffees as they slowly rode their bikes up Bedford Avenue. This was the opposite of that.

  One other thing I noticed: Everyone was white. Some were blond and blue-eyed, others had brown hair and hazel eyes, and some were a little darker, Armenian or Jewish, but still white. The construction sites, meanwhile, were manned by Central Asians, short and thin, while Central Asian women, in orange vests, tidied up the various courtyards.

  Before returning home I ducked into a tiny grocery at the corner of Bolshaya Lubyanka and the boulevard. It smelled bad and the two women behind the counter seemed annoyed to have a customer. Beer took up most of the small space, but they also had cold cuts—that must have been the source of the smell—and, more important, what I was looking for: sushki. These were round, crunchy, slightly sweet bread rings. Because they were a little sweet you could have them with tea, but because they weren’t too sweet you could also have them with beer. I bought two packets, one with poppy seeds, one without. Unlike everything else in the new Russia, sushki were still cheap.

  When I got home, my grandmother was sitting at the kitchen table, with four little phone books spread out before her. She didn’t hear me come in and I saw her slowly reading through one of them, repeating “Alla Aaronovna” to herself, searching for the name.

  “Andryush,” she said when she finally saw me, “were you the one who left me this note?”

  I nodded.

  “I can’t find an Alla Aaronovna anywhere. Are you sure that’s who it was?”

  I was sure. I should have asked for her number! But she sounded certain that my grandmother would know exactly who she was.

  My grandmother looked down helplessly at her many phone books. “Andryushenka,” she said, holding one out to me like an offering. “Can you find it in here?”

  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 triu
mph.

  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.

  Moscow’s subway, also built by Stalin, was justly famous. In the center of the city the stations were glorious, laid out in marble, decorated in colorful mosaics depicting the heroic achievements of the working class. Some still featured giant statues of Lenin or Marx or Red Army soldiers fighting off the Nazis. The stations were spotless, and even in the stuffy final days of August they were always cool. Trains came quickly and efficiently, and a digital clock at the entrance to the tunnel in each station indicated to the second the time that had passed since the last train departed. By the time the clock reached two minutes and thirty seconds, another train had usually arrived.

  But riding this famous metro with my grandmother, I quickly came to see its limitations. It was incredibly crowded: because all the lines but one were radial, that is, running from the center of the circle that was Moscow to its outskirts, there was no way to transfer from one line to another without going through the center, meaning that basically all travelers were routed through a few stations near the Kremlin, which is where we lived. Every time we got on a train, it was packed. And packed here meant something different from what it did in New York. In New York during rush hour the trains could be so crowded that people couldn’t get on, and had to wait for the next train. In Moscow when this happened, people got on anyway.

  The trains themselves were OK, but, unlike the station platforms, hot and stuffy, filled with the body odor of a hundred Russian men. And finally and worst of all, there were simply not enough stops. No matter where you arrived, you still had some walking to do.

  We tried to head out to Sokolniki Park, just a few metro stops away, while the weather was still nice. But the subway ride and the walk to the park tired my grandmother out. The sway of the fast trains made her nauseous. The jostling and bumping upset her. “Let’s go home,” she said, just about as soon as we emerged from the metro.

  “We just got here,” I said. “Let’s at least make it to the park.”

  “I’m telling you I want to go home!”

  I stopped. She was holding on to my arm and stopped as well. We were just outside the Sokolniki metro, with people going in and out of the heavy swinging doors. My grandmother was so small. She had put on her little light-blue sun hat for our trip, and her light-green summer pants. “Whatever you want,” I said, though I was upset.

  “Fine,” my poor tired grandmother said at last. “Let’s just go to the park and then go back.”

  We walked to the park and sat for a while on a bench just inside it. Then we headed home again. Neither of us had found the trip much fun. I knew that I was to blame for not coming up with something better. But I didn’t know what that could be.

  My grandmother had once been devoted to cinema, taking the train in from Dubna on weekends to see whatever was playing at the House of Cinema near Mayakovskaya—she received hard-to-find passes from a man she’d once dated, before she met Uncle Lev. She liked to complain to whoever would listen that the movies at the Dubna House of Culture were always six months out of date. Now she told me she could no longer stand the movies. “It’s just bakh-bakh-bakh,” she said, miming a gun with her hand. “I can’t watch.” She had a paper with entertainment listings that she still bought, out of habit, every single week from a newsstand next to the Azeri chicken guys, and one morning she handed it to me. “Andryush,” she said, “can you find something for us to see?” She had marked up the film section with checks and circles and crosses, but I got the sense that she was doing this at random. The trouble was, I didn’t know any better than she did. I took the paper to the Coffee Grind so I could use the internet to puzzle out which movies it was referring to, since most of them were American or British, and I didn’t recognize the titles in translation. Once I’d puzzled them out, I saw the problem: almost all the foreign movies playing in Moscow (and since the collapse of the Russian film industry in the early 1990s, almost all the movies playing in Moscow were foreign) were shit. It was Kung Fu Panda, The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, and Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa. No offense intended, but many of these movies were cartoons; the rest were bakh-bakh-bakh, just as my grandmother said. In the end, to avoid the bakh-bakh-bakh, I found us an artsy Danish film that was showing at what seemed from its website to be a quasi-underground film place not far from our house. The address for the cinema was Red Army Avenue, 24, which I naïvely thought would mean it was on Red Army Avenue; it turned out the cinema was in an inner courtyard off Red Army Avenue. While we were searching for it, it started to rain; my grandmother pleaded for us to give up, but I insisted I could find it, left her under an awning, and ran around for five minutes until I did. I came back to fetch my tired and slightly wet grandmother and dragged her to the theater. Inside were several dozen young Moscow hipsters, wearing Converse. My people! They would think I was pretty cool for bringing my grandmother. Except that they did not. She got hushed twice for asking me what was happening in the film. The hipsters looked annoyed when we went past them halfway through so my grandmother could use the bathroom. At the end of the film, she asked me what I thought, and I sort of shrugged, not wanting to get into it. She then declared very loudly, “It was so boring!” A few of the hipsters shot us dirty looks. But she was right. The movie was boring. After that I put our film viewing on hold.

  My grandmother’s problem was not that she couldn’t handle the tasks life still put before her. She could handle them. Her problem was loneliness. “The thing is,” she would say to me during our walks, or over lunch, or over breakfast, “all my friends have died. Everyone
close to me has died. Borya Kraisenstern died. Lyubima Gershkovich died. Rosa Pipkin died. Look,” she said, picking up her phone books, “these are just lists of the dead now. Just dead, dead, dead.” Occasionally I would try to argue (What about Dima? What about me?), but in its broad outlines it was true. Her lone remaining friend was Emma Abramovna, with whom she talked on the phone quite frequently, but since Emma Abramovna’s dacha lacked a landline, their conversations consisted primarily of my grandmother saying, “What? I didn’t hear that!” They would have this conversation multiple times a day. Once in a while I would hear my grandmother bringing up the dacha. “How is Peredelkino?” she would say. “Is it nice there?” Hearing an answer in the affirmative, she would say sadly, “Here in the city it’s so stuffy. I can hardly breathe.”

  Unable to travel to the park, worried about seeing another bad movie, we contented ourselves with walking along the little green pedestrian mall in between the traffic lanes of the boulevard. Our stretch of it went from the statue of Lenin’s widow, Nadezhda Krupskaya, to the giant scary RussOil building across from Clean Ponds. We walked back and forth between these, arguing. My grandmother argued that she was neglected and abandoned, that Dima didn’t love her, and that I wasn’t going to stay very long. I argued that Dima was busy, that she was not abandoned, and that I would stay as long as necessary. I thought it was important to correct the things she was mistaken about, or even to challenge the things she was right about, just to keep the grooves of her memory working. This was often frustrating, as she didn’t seem to believe me, and only sometimes because I was lying.