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the stroke. After the stroke she had a heart attack and then another stroke.
    The doctors were astounded by the resiliency of her body, attributing it to her long life in the countryside. Yet even after she was wheelchair-bound and paralyzed on one side, Grandma could not shake her belief that the Social Security men were due any minute. It happened to her cousin Aaron in Kiev in 1949. A pianist by profession, he had had half his fingers amputated in a frozen Kamchatka labor camp. There were lessons to be learned from that.
    Finally, Vladimir’s father moved Grandma out to the suburbs, where she soon found a new enemy in the face of the “murderous, tree-chopping Hindu” of a neighbor, who had once remarked on the size and beauty of the oak trees straddling the property line. And that’s how her heroic vigil in the backyard began.
    Vladimir stood behind Grandmother patting her sparse hair. He found a space between two moles atop the warm, wrinkled globe of her forehead and kissed her there, eliciting an astonished look from his father, Grandmother’s official keeper. What’s this? Dr. Girshkin seemed to be saying. Co-conspirators in my own house?
    “Of course, there’s no hog, babushka, ” Vladimir spoke softly. “Who raises hogs in Westchester? It’s just not done.”
    Grandmother grabbed his hand and bit it affectionately with both of her teeth. “My dear one!” she said. “My only one!” And she was right. They were in this together. Mother and Father may have gone ahead and become rich Americans, but Grandma andVladimir were still of the same blood, as if a generation had been skipped between them.
    After all, she had raised Vladimir, teaching him to write Cyrillic letters when he was four, awarding two grams of cheese for every Slavonic squiggle mastered. She would take him each Sunday to the Piskaryovko mass grave for the defenders of Leningrad—that most instructive of Russia’s field trips—where they would leave fresh daisies for his grandfather Moysei, a slight, thoughtful man shyly holding on to Grandma’s elbow in wedding photos, who perished in a tank battle on the city’s outskirts. And after this simple reckoning in front of a statue of the Motherland, weeping over an eternal flame, Grandma would ceremoniously tie a red handkerchief around Vladimir’s neck. Asthma or not, she promised him, he would join the Red Pioneers someday and then the Komsomol Youth League and then, if he behaved himself well, the Communist Party. “To fight for the cause of Lenin and the Soviet people, are you ready!” she would drill him.
    “Always ready!” he would shout back.
    But, in the end, the Red Pioneers would have to march on without him . . .In the end, in the late 1970s, to be exact, the gentle, toothy American Jimmy Carter swapped tons of Midwestern grain for tons of Soviet Jews, and suddenly Vladimir and Grandmother found themselves walking out of the International Arrivals Building at JFK. They took one look at the endless America humming her Gershwin tune before them and cried in each other’s arms.
    And this was Grandma today—wheelchair-bound, imprisoned in one of the world’s most expensive backyards, the rustle of stealth station wagons sliding into adjacent driveways, meat burning everywhere, her grandson a grown man with dark circles under his eyes who came to visit his family seasonally, as if they lived in the wilds of Connecticut and not some twenty kilometers beyond the Triborough Bridge.
    Yes, Grandma deserved at least one more kiss from Vladimir, but kissing the old woman in front of his father made Vladimir uncomfortable. Grandmother was Dr. Girshkin’s life, his burden and domain, just as Mother was Vladimir’s. Perhaps after the barbecue, if he still felt this tender and bereft, he could smooch her in private.
    “People! Opa!” They looked up. Mother was leaning out of her third-floor study, waving a bottle of rum. “He’ll be twenty-six soon. Get out that grill!”
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