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Copyright © 2014 by Yelena Akhtiorskaya
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Akhtiorskaya, Yelena.
Panic in a suitcase: a novel / Yelena Akhtiorskaya.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-101-63826-2
1. Russian Americans—Fiction. 2. Immigrant families—United States—Fiction. 3. American Dream—Fiction. 4. Intergenerational relations—Fiction. 5. Brighton Beach (New York, N.Y.)—Fiction. 6. Brooklyn (New York, N.Y.)—Fiction. 7. Domestic fiction. I. Title.
PS3601.K54P36 2014 2013038939
813'.6—dc23
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Version_1
To my family, who never fails to make the Truth stranger
CONTENTS
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT
DEDICATION
PART ONE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
PART TWO
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
PART ONE
1993
ONE
THE MORNING WAS IDEAL, a crime to waste it cooped up. They were off to the shore. That means you, too, Pasha—you need some color, a dunk would do you good, so would a stroll. Aren’t you curious to see Coney Island? Freud had been. Don’t deliberate till it’s too late. Strokes are known to make surprise appearances in the family. Who knows how long . . . ? Now, get up off that couch!
Pasha had just flown in last night and didn’t feel well—achy joints, profuse sweating, a bout of tachycardia. It was as if his family could hear the roar of blood in his ears and tried to shout over it. A sum total of fourteen hours strapped into an aisle seat near the gurgling lavatory of a dented, gasoline-reeking airplane, two layovers, and a night spent in the stiff embrace of a plastic bench in the Kiev airport would’ve been tough on any constitution, and Pasha didn’t have just any constitution but that of a poet—sickly from the outset, the dysfunction lying in the vital organs (heart, lungs), nose and ears disproportionately large for the head, head abnormally large for the body, premature stains under the eyes, spooky immobility of gaze, vermicelli limbs, metabolic peculiarities. If he’d been smart, he would’ve been born at least half a century earlier into a noble family and spent his adult life hopping between tiny Swiss Alp towns and lakeside sanatoria, soaking in bathhouses and natural springs, rubbing thighs with steamy neurotics, taking aimless strolls with the assistance of a branch, corrupting tubercular maidens, composing spirited if long-winded letters to those with this-world cares, letters that would seem to emerge from a time vacuum, with epigrammatic morsels of wisdom and nature descriptions of the breathtaking but exasperating sort.
Instead Pasha was born in 1956 to a family whose nobility was strictly of spirit. A dusty courtyard was the extent of his interactions with nature, a branch of assistance only in fending off feral dogs. He rode trams, avoided doctors. Correspondences, if initiated, fell by the wayside before long. He grew to be unreasonably tall (a result of too many parsnips—that must’ve been it, since he never touched a carrot or a potato), though it would’ve been better were he small and compact, considering the quality of motor control he exercised. His figure moved precariously along the street. There were hovels, abandoned or rustling with elderly squatters, that proceeded to stand while promising to collapse with the next gust. They were plenty on the outskirts of Odessa, but even in the city center there was one on most blocks. They no longer struck the eye as a single entity—a house—but as a pile of boards, bent, twisted, leaning; a heap, rubble, cats. Pasha’s skeletal structure was a bit like that. Prophets are not meant to be healthy, wrote Brodsky, who suffered his first myocardial infarction at the age of thirty-six. At least he’d had broad shoulders. A poet must be feeble, ugly, somehow at a physical disadvantage; if not born that way, he’d promptly get to work on his disintegration by way of alcohol, cigarettes, insomnia, depression. Pasha didn’t have to put in the effort. His time could be spent on other endeavors.
Pasha’s physique resembled Odessa’s habitations but not its inhabitants, who were built well (no complaints there). They were tall but not beyond their means, spry and sinewy, with tans so deep they must’ve had extra layers of skin, crude jawlines, and coarse yellow hair. They ate fried dough, fried cabbage, dog meat, and exuded an obstinate vitality. Yet it seemed as if nature had taken less time with them, not more, as if the craft were in the defects. Their superior biological constitutions were perhaps correlated to the dilapidation of their dwelling spaces; there’s an inverse relationship to be found here.
Other relationships, however, required tending. Pasha was in Brooklyn, where both the buildings and the people were in need of fortifying, and he’d be honoring the borough with his presence for all of July—the entire month! There would be no shortage of first-rate mornings, he pointed out to his restless kin, who mistook the manipulations of neuroses for liveliness, enthusiasm. Look out the window! they shouted. Just look out the window!
Tomorrow will be even better, said Pasha. Not as humid.
How presumptuous. What did he know about Julys in New York? As a matter of fact, they were wet, dreary, unpredictable. All of this, however, was beside the point. Having just arrived, he should want to spend time with his family. They’d have plenty of opportunities to tire of one another.
If there was tension, it was partly attributable to the way Pasha had dealt with his impending visit, which was the way he dealt with all practical matters—avoid until they could be avoided no more, a point decided not by him but by external forces (however hard he tried to ignore these forces, they wouldn’t ignore him). His sister, Marina, had done everything within her power to simplify the process short of chartering a private jet. She’d decided on the dates and sent him the fare for his ticket. They had no money, but Pasha had even less. When he received the envelope with the cash and felt its weight in his palm, it was somehow even less tangible than when he’d been informed it was coming. He put the envelope in the center of the kitchen table and for the next month endured a dread of mealtimes, indulging the preference to eat at his desk. Nothing happened, yet the days passed. He grew pale and perplexed. There wasn’t a more horrifying, cold-sweat-inducing suspicion than that those external forces had finally decided to give up on him. He spoke regularly with his father, Robert, who wouldn’t dare strain relations by mentioning such banalities as a plane ticket. M
arina juggled an increasing number of jobs and was always running in and out of the background, passing on hellos. But one day she grabbed the phone. Evidently she’d lost her sense for small talk and banter, the very traits her new land was known to cultivate. What time do we pick you up? she asked. A silence. I’ll tell you tomorrow, replied Pasha. The travel agency ridiculed him. Tickets now cost twice the amount he’d been sent, money he didn’t have. Marina flew into a howling rage that Pasha couldn’t comprehend—really, it was a simple mistake. Then, just as suddenly, the tempest turned off. The abruptness of the switch from stormy to calm only demonstrated how often such a switch had been practiced, how little faith she had in communicating a message to her brother, and how after all these years she’d come to the cynical conclusion, though she wasn’t cynical in the least, that to take offense was fruitless, that nothing could be worked out but only buried and masked.
Pasha gave a sigh and rolled to a sitting position. Agreement scattered everybody—they rushed into and out of rooms, to the bathroom, for a drink of water, to pack the cherries, gather the towels, where are Robert’s swimming trunks, and what about the beach blanket? Watching Pasha get ready was worse than watching a pot boil. It wasn’t that he had a leisurely disposition but that his brain and body had long ago, perhaps at birth, suffered a breach, leaving his body on autopilot. His mind was neglectful, self-involved, preoccupied; its moods didn’t reflect on the body, which applied a mechanical thoroughness to every undertaking, whether tying his shoelaces, blowing his nose, typing, or consuming Hunan shrimp, discovered last night to be more effective than corticosteroids for his sinusitis. By the time his shorts were buttoned—or rather his brother-in-law Levik’s shorts, since Pasha had brought with him for a monthlong visit only one pair (also Levik’s hand-me-downs), onto which he’d immediately tipped the welcoming glass of young Georgian wine—Esther, Pasha’s mother, had packed a suitcase of nourishment (apples, cherries, plums, apricots, or the hard balls of assorted sizes and shades that passed for them in this country), replenishment (bologna sandwiches), stimulant (black tea), reward (poppy-seed rolls), punishment (carrots), and something to pass the time with (sunflower seeds, clothes that needed mending). Habits shouldn’t be allowed to cement—they must be extracted early on, like wisdom teeth. In Odessa, Esther and Robert’s dacha had been a ten-minute walk from the sea, which for reasons that don’t translate was considered a long, arduous journey. If a crucial beach accoutrement was forgotten at home, no one would’ve thought to go back to get it. Decades of this kind of training had instilled a dogged discipline. Now that the ocean was in the front yard of their building, Esther still packed so that nothing would be lacking. The governing rule: There must be surplus, yet nothing should spoil.
At the last moment, Levik decided he’d rather not go—it was Shark Week on the Discovery Channel. Tape it, said Marina. But he was developing a migraine. Wear a cap and take two Advil. Where’s the sunscreen? There’s no sunscreen—what do you think this is, a pharmacy? Well, they wouldn’t be long, just an hour, hour and a half, before the sun got strong. But it’s already a quarter of eleven! Did they still have that umbrella with the green and beige stripes? Maybe it was in the hall closet with the other junk— Are you out of your mind? It ripped ages ago, not to mention flew off with a not-particularly-hearty gust into the Atlantic. Marina peeked into her daughter’s room. Two giant, grimy feet poked out from under a blanket. Frida! she screamed. We’re off to the beach without you!
Esther took this moment to corner her son. Her damp face gave off a postmenopausal odor, like overripe apricot flesh. The sweat never had time to dry. And like flypaper it caught everything it came into contact with—hairs, lint, fruit flies. Pasha, she said, can I ask a tiny favor, please don’t get angry, just try to hear me out, a bit of patience—
Out with it!
Take that thing off.
Oh, not this again.
Just while you’re here—for Frida’s sake.
She’s nine!
But she’s a curious girl. She’ll start asking questions, and next thing you know—
She’s running off to join a convent?
It’s not impossible. She still occasionally makes the sign of the cross over herself.
And that’s my fault?
Where else did she get it?
TV. Classmates. She goes to school by now, I hope.
Is it so much to ask, Pasha? Would it be so difficult?
He looked to the side, as if consulting the couch. He’d thought that the combination of circumstances—the separation, his mother’s condition, the palliative effect of time—would’ve finally rendered this a non-issue. Wishful thinking. His conversion was bound to remain an open wound on the family flesh, susceptible to infection. At twenty he’d inflicted the injury. There had been the technicality of the process—an elaborate theater of spite, as Esther called it, convinced that every step of it was being done to undo her. The catechumen period had been auspiciously brief. The priest practically apologized on God’s behalf, as if Pasha’s soul had ended up in the Yid pile by accident, in a forgetful or clumsy moment. He received the Eucharist like a crying toddler slipped a pacifier. At last spiritually content. He wore a conspicuous though not garish silver crucifix around his neck (later tucked into T-shirts), attended services, believed in creationism, had convincing arguments and logical proofs against Darwin’s theory, which had the quality of withering immediately in the convinced person’s brain and being impossible to paraphrase, and collected icons. The icons weren’t just any old icons, rather they were very old icons, obtained after hours of sifting through junk under the junk owner’s suspicious stare and briny breath, plucked from the heaps of vendors who had no clue they possessed anything of worth and wouldn’t have believed it if you told them. The Soviet Union’s skewed ratio of valuable objects to discerning collectors resulted in Pasha’s acquiring a reputation for clutter. Correction: domestic chaos. Someone was usually around to provide the reproaching. One evening he came home holding a tiny wooden panel with chipped, blackened paint in which he claimed to see the Virgin of Kazan. At least two hundred years old, he said, trembling. Ten kopecks! After months of painstaking restoration, the black lady materialized for everyone to see. Not all instances were so exemplary.
To be sure, Pasha was a far cry from a zealot. The conversion was an appropriation of aesthetic symbols and traditions essential to his craft. Did he not consider, however, that he could appropriate them without the theater, as, for example, Brodsky had? Was it really necessary to believe? A grand gesture had been in order. Pasha stood too apart, was too achingly himself. Self-consciousness in such extreme potency wouldn’t do for a Russian poet. By joining the Orthodox Church with its hundred million adherents (exact figure?), its seventy-five percent of the Russian population, the fledgling Pasha had been fastening a link that would allow him to roam freely without the danger of floating off into the attic of an ivory tower (reverse gravity being the poet’s hazard). And through this link he’d stave off tendencies inherited from a line of depressives. Father, grandfather, uncles, great-grandfathers—dysthymic men of Literature and Medicine, oblivious to the political and cultural climate, abiding only mental weather, then wondering how they got caught in this pogrom or that war. Pasha stifled his genetic tendencies before they could stifle him. Tied to a belief system and other souls, he had no choice but to care, to be affected, to be a part.
What an outburst his mother’s request would’ve provoked a few years ago, how indignant he would’ve gotten, how hot in the face. That he was even considering complying was a sign that he was getting old. But he knew regardless, with or without signs. If it’ll make you happy, he said, growing a double chin as he struggled with the clasp.
The beach! Unable to coordinate a mass exodus, they left in spurts, Esther and Robert hauling supplies in the lead, and five minutes later Marina tugged Levik’s weight off the couch, instructing Frida to get ready quickly and not leave without her uncle, th
ey’d be waiting in the usual spot, to the left of lifeguard Hercules. The door slammed shut, a reverberating silence spread through the apartment. Frida dashed into the bathroom, tripping over her stocky legs as she slipped into a cobalt bikini, checking in, momentarily, with her recently activated nipples. Esther was convinced the American diet was to blame. What in the diet? No one would’ve let her administer the experiments she was devising to find out. Frida flew into the living room. Her uncle sat on a footstool, leaning forward to turn the glossy page of a book that lay on the floor. Let’s go! she said.
Pasha raised his husklike head. It seemed to breathe from the top.
Look at this, he said, directing her attention to the floor. She fidgeted, her jutting globular knees (like his jutting globular knees) punched the cotton sunflowers of her dress, which even Pasha could tell was all wrong for her. She wasn’t an airy little girl. There was something sumoesque in her stance. She was more substantial than many of the full-grown women in Pasha’s literary milieu. Her focus was like the seaweed-green vase, Esther’s favorite, once transported by way of a dozen anecdotes from Poland, that Pasha had elbowed off the piano when leaning in to hug his father on arrival. It had shattered into more pieces than it had been made of.
They’re waiting for us, said Frida.
Don’t be egocentric. Nobody’s thinking about us. They’re probably swimming by now.
I want to swim!
It’s good to hold off on pleasures.
Why?
Do you want to get into a lengthy discussion, or do you want to see something and go?
A groan propelled her. She stood over the lower of Pasha’s uneven shoulders but kept a distance—it was hard not to consider him a stranger.
Grandpa already showed me, she said triumphantly. It’s Japanese.
Grandpa doesn’t have this one.
Despair! Once more the exit obscured, Frida dragged to the floor, to a clean white mountain taking up most of the page. Caucasus, she said. But in the lower right corner were little blue squiggles. She knelt, and her head eclipsed the scene. Three little people in blue robes with white plates on their heads. They’d taste sour. But the mountain was of milk. A jagged edge as if the top had been bitten off. On the opposite page was something different—a man with a blue face, black wash of hair, deformed hands. Like Max’s father down the hall. His wide mouth filled with ink—or he had no mouth, no teeth or tongue, only spilled ink. I don’t like this, she said, and pushed it away. The book jacket snagged on a loose nail to the distinct rip of paper. Something welled up within Frida that made her repeat herself but more venomously and look at Pasha as if he were a monster, and the welling intensified, constricting her throat.
Panic in a Suitcase: A Novel Page 1
