I whirled a yellow triangle of a gingko leaf in my hand, feeling how incredibly soft it was despite having been left to dry in my Cell Biology textbook for the past few months. A slight crack at the top bore witness of the time when I tried to actually bend it and was disappointed with deceitfulness of its freshness. Its miniscule needles clung to each other and made the leaf look whole and complete, even though their very existence suggested otherwise. It was not yet a complete leaf; it represented that missing link, the step in the evolution between conifers and flowering plants.
I remember picking this leaf up on my way to a class a few months ago. It was a bright and sunny day, a rarity for Pennsylvania that late in the autumn. I was not late so I could allow myself to walk slowly, enjoying the warmth, and the gingko leaf lay on my path, its bright yellow almost reflecting the light of the sun and contrasting starkly with the gray of the asphalt. When I brought it home and put it in my Cell Biology book for safe keeping, I thought about my grandmother, who was to come for a visit in a few weeks and how she must have never seen a gingko tree, the only sort of a tree with its needles bound into leaves, before. I decided keep this leaf in my textbook and show it to her upon her arrival. I even went back and picked a few more for her to take home to Russia as a souvenir.
Now, however, holding the gingko leaf in my hand and tracing its soft greenish yellow needles with my finger, I could clearly remember that I forgot. My grandmother left the day before to go back to Russia, and I had forgotten to show her this leaf, forgotten to share with her a part of the natural phenomenon that is a gingko tree.
I remember coming across this leaf a few weeks after my grandmother’s arrival. I was studying Cell Biology, of course, and the gingko leaf, disturbing the orderliness of the pages and creating an unnatural separation between them, as usual, made the book open at its precise location. I was busy, though. I had to have been; after all, I was studying. I cannot clearly remember now the subject of that study or the test I was probably preparing then for, but I do remember that I just put the gingko leaf back to its place on the opening page of the chapter on visualization of the cell, reasoning that I had more than a month ahead of me to show it to her and returning to my studies.
I wanted so much to spend some time with Grandma during those last weeks of the previous semester. Day in and day out, I locked myself in my room studying, and all the while I wished to be downstairs with her. I envied my mother, who, despite having to work during the day, came home in the evenings and spent them with my Grandma. I even envied my sister, Katya, when she got a terrible cold, with the temperature bordering 40˚C, and had to stay in bed for a few days, our grandmother bringing her a cup of tea with honey or a sandwich every once in a while and spending most of her time in the living room (where my sister’s bed was relocated for the time of Grandma’s visit) to watch over her and to berate American doctors, which would not see a sick girl without an appointment.
It seems to me that it was somehow easier for Katya to communicate with our grandmother. She could just climb into her bed early in the morning, while I was usually getting an early start at my homework, and they spent hours talking with each other. Sometimes they got into an argument about my sister’s refusal to wear sweaters she deemed unstylish in the cold, for example, but mostly it was peaceful and quiet. I am more or less sure that Katya wanted to recreate the times during our childhood when Grandma visited us in Russia, and all three of us spent hours in the morning in my grandmother’s bed, her telling us stories about her childhood or things she had recently read and us reciting for her poems we had learned in school.
Back then the schoolwork was easy for me, and an hour of homework during a weekend could usually earn me an A in a class. Now, though, to maintain such high level of achievement, I needed to study as much as I possibly could. The guilt over allowing myself not to rest while the work was compiling incessantly now conflicted with the guilt over leaving my Grandma alone while my parents were off at work, Katya at school, and I was either on campus or studying in my room. I had my doubts about whether my grandmother was really enjoying her stay with us being gone much of each weekday. I asked her if she was bored once, but she replied that it was better than being alone far away from us with no one to wait for to come home.
It was not much better when I got to actually be with her, though. I simply did not know what to do. During the Thanksgiving and Christmas vacations, I read aloud to her – first Monday Starts on Saturday by brothers Strugatskys (a science fiction novel my grandmother was hesitant about in the beginning, claiming that it is too much of a fantasy, too detached from reality, so I had to convince her to give it a try) and then The Year They Burned the Books by Nancy Garden, a book I had translated to Russian half a year ago so my Grandma specifically asked for it. But looking back on it, reading was only a way to fill in a void. As atoms, when coming together to form molecules, can form either bonding or antibonding orbitals for their shared electrons, so the reading seems to me to have been antibonding for us. I could have talked with her, asked her to tell me about her life, about her experiences during World War II, about her experiences in the world today, like I did when I was little and, pensively looking into her face, had asked her time and time again to tell me “something about someone.” I could have done something that really mattered to both her and me; I do not even know what – just something. Instead I read to her. I did something she could have done just as well on her own. Perhaps she did enjoy it, or at least she enjoyed spending time with me. But I knew that for me it was false, that I was reading because I could not come up with anything else for the two of us to do together and because I was afraid of having an actual conversation.
Once in a while she came to me herself. I remember that the day after Grandma’s arrival was a Tuesday, and I woke up to the sound of the beeping of my alarm clock. Still lying in bed and trying to open my eyes and focus on the necessity of getting up, I heard someone slowly ascending the stairs to my third-floor room. Nobody else in our house moved that slowly, and I remember feeling guilt over making my grandmother go up the stairs to see me. When I asked her whether it was difficult for her to traverse all the stairs in our apartment, she said, no, it was good for her to have the exercise. I don’t think I believed her, or at least I know I did not many times later when I heard those slow steps on the staircase to my room.
She came to see me that morning to ask if I wanted a massage. She knew how I love massages, especially since countless hours of studying and sitting in bent poses are making the muscles in my back weak and sore. It was nice to have someone care so much about me, and I lay back down on my bed, closing my eyes and allowing the blackness interspersed with red and yellow dots and intricate webs of light thin lines take over my vision. She rubbed an almond-scented lotion into her hands and began massaging my back. I was thinking about nothing in particular or maybe about some subject I was studying. Her doctor’s fingers deftly worked my back, rubbing the muscles, tracing the vertebra… We both were silent.
Two days before my grandmother’s going back to Russia, my Mom took her, my sister and me to Pizza Hut as a sort of farewell party. The red booth we were sitting in, the large golden lamp right above it, the naked brick of the walls, and the virtual lack of other patrons made the place look small and cozy as we sat down to eat. I do not remember what prompted this topic of conversation, but Katya asked our grandmother half jokingly, “What are we going to do without you?”
“Go hungry, probably,” I replied since Grandma was the one to cook for us for the past few months. I cannot be sure if this is precisely what I said – our conversation was in Russian, and I do not remember the exact words – but the unadorned pragmatism of the meaning was the same.
“No, without you, we are going to be…,” Katya started, trailing off and turning to me. “Assya, how do you say ‘empty’ in Russian?” she asked in English.
I did not answer. It crossed my mind for a second that my sister was just indescribably sentimental, that she was just saying what she thought to be sensitive. After all, it was the same person who had berated all members of our family, including Grandma herself, for saying that our grandmother is old. I am sure that Katya could not have actually thought that Grandma’s seventy-five years of age do not make her elderly, but instead considered flattery more appropriate than the truth would have been. So perhaps my sister really was simply being superficial. I don’t think so. In any case, I also did not answer Katya’s question because I felt ashamed.
We said goodbye to each other in the morning of the day she left. I was pulling on the black gloves she gave me for New Year and was not feeling much sadness. I knew I was supposed to; I knew by the sheer force of logic that she is old and I might never see her again, but I could not feel it. Perhaps, I was so used to her living with us for these past two months or so that it simply did not seem real that she was indeed leaving. I do not know. I hugged her and kissed her wrinkly cheek, while she was shooing me out the door, afraid that I would miss the bus. “Do svidanya, babulya,” – goodbye, grandma, I said, my voice almost automatically assuming a sad inflection. Finally, for some reason taking more time than I usually do, I pulled my backpack onto my right shoulder and went out the door. I stopped outside and looked back. She was standing at the window, holding the white blinds covering it away so as to get a better look, and waving her final goodbye at me. I waved back at her, and then turned away to go to the bus stop. It was cold and white outside.
I was riding a bus to the campus the day my grandmother left. It had just passed the downtown and the College Avenue bordered by mountains of compressed snow cleared off the sidewalks, picking up a middle-aged black woman on a stop. I was looking at the other passengers and out the window, observing the red brick giant of the Recreation Hall sliding past me. The bus turned to enter the campus, the inertia pulling my body to the left on the hard maroon-orange seat. And suddenly I felt a painful bitterness in my throat and that awful heaviness which is most likely what a literary cliché calls “heartache”, but which in reality fills the entire chest, accumulating somewhere in the lower regions of the ribcage. It was all I could do to hold back tears from flowing down my face right there in the bus. I had to remind myself that Grandma had not left, not yet. She was still here in State College, a mere mile or so away. It did not help.
