This is The Writer's Voice, new fiction from The New Yorker.

I'm Deborah Treasman, fiction editor at The New Yorker.

On this episode of The Writer's Voice, we'll hear Keith Gessen read his story,

How Did We Come to Know You?

From the April 16th, 2018 issue of the magazine.

Gesson's first novel, All the Sad Young Literary Men, came out in 2008. From the April 16th, 2018 issue of the magazine,

Gessen's first novel, All the Sad Young Literary Men, came out in 2008.

His second novel, A Terrible Country, from which this story was adapted,

will be published in July.

Now here's Keith Gessen.

How did we come to know you?

I was sitting in the kitchen one evening, checking my email, when my grandmother told me she was going for a walk. It was snowing a little and slippery. I could see that, but it wasn't too slippery.

Despite the cold, my grandmother had been out earlier to get some groceries and had done just fine.

I felt like I should go with her, but I also wanted to

continue checking my email. Was I just going to spend my whole life going out with my grandmother

whenever the notion struck her? That was no way to live. I went over and kissed her on the

forehead and told her to have a good walk. Not 30 minutes later, I heard a sharp cry in the stairwell.

At first, I thought it was a dog or a child, but then I realized exactly who it was. I ran out onto the

landing. My grandmother was lying on her back at the bottom of the stairs. Her eyes were open,

and she was holding her head and looking at me. She was scared. I went down and helped her up. Her thick pink coat had cushioned the fall, but when I looked at the back of her head, I saw that there was blood. Oh, Andrushenka, she said. I'm so stupid. I'm so stupid. My head is spinning. I got her upstairs, helped her out of her coat, then laid her down on her bed and looked up the number for an ambulance. It was zero-three. I dialed it and explained that my grandmother had hit her head. The woman on the other end asked if I thought my grandmother was in danger. I had no idea. Is she conscious? the woman asked. I said yes. This apparently helped her make a determination as to where to send us.

She said that an ambulance would be there in 20 minutes, and it was.

I'll never forget the view of Moscow I got from the back of that ambulance as we stopped and started through the traffic on the garden ring.

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