Panic in a Suitcase: A Novel

by Yelena Akhtiorskaya

  Marina never rested her legs or plucked a magazine from the pile. There was always a slippery personage to track down, some bit of information to obtain, a minor error to not overlook. Marina’s voice, unlike those of the others, was loud but never hysterical. Her assured silence was just as soothing as her assured speech. It was only natural that she assume full responsibility for their interactions with doctors, telling them what Esther felt and where and what Esther wanted and how, then telling Esther what the doctors never quite formulated themselves. The Indian doctor hardly spoke, the Australian doctor rattled off warm but unintelligible volumes, and it would’ve been better not to understand the German doctor. Having long stopped seeing patients as humans and disease as something unfortunate occurring within a patient who was human, he was interested only in recruiting the diseases, in whichever package they were delivered to him (brown hair, blond hair, fleshy, thin), for his ongoing, alternating, and evolving experimental studies.

  If it was being offered, Esther was willing, sign her up. Sickness from treatment was preferable to sickness from disease. There was almost an invigorating aspect to it. The fact that she wasn’t well meant that she was getting better—the treatment was working, and she only wanted it to work more, fearing that she wasn’t suffering enough. She pressured Marina to pressure the doctors for more chemo, stronger radiation, additional sessions, newer drugs—she was strong, she could take it. Sure enough, in many instances the doctors could be convinced. When she suffered third-degree burns, they saw no reason to take the blame.

  At least the hospital had been fortuitously plopped on the Upper East Side of Manhattan—you must take advantage, said Esther. No need for them all to sit for hours in the soul-crushing, disease-saturated atmosphere just because she had to. What a waste of a wonderful opportunity. Robert would keep her company. The two of them would rattle sugar packets, visit bedecked mansions in the high resolution of real-estate magazines, play card games as treatment was intravenously delivered. Marina had done more than enough; there was simply no one left to bother. Hospital employees shuddered at the drum of her footsteps, secretaries twitched as she advanced to their posts. And it must be remembered that Pasha was in New York for a limited time only. Siblings should spend quality time together.

  Illness has made Mama generous, said Pasha, falling behind to let Marina start up the revolving door. She must be in negotiations with the mighty powers.

  She wants to be left alone.

  Don’t we all? Pasha was unable to dislodge a bone. She’s always terrorized me, a recent claim. Last summer’s conversation proved but a glimpse—Marina had no desire to see more. Where to, she said, Metropolitan or Guggenheim?

  Actually, said Pasha, I’ve been intending to make a purchase.

  Canal Street was where the train spit them out. Pasha’s request, yet he stood frozen. Struck dumb by tourists in bold T-shirts. The insignia on baseball caps bled together into one strange character of an alien alphabet constituting precisely the terrible nonlanguage of the street. Calamity was the result of such senseless diversity. Each nationality had its own approach to shopping. In some countries if you wanted a plastic turtle, you pushed, in others you formed lines and were mercilessly cut off. Everybody, however, regardless of origin, wanted to be heard. And to be heard it was necessary to shout. Second opinions were in urgent demand. Aggressive shopper personalities were activated for purposes of basic protection. People trying to preemptively avoid a mishap in which they looked foolish or got squeezed out of a few bucks were at their worst. They needed to multitask (not the species’ strong suit), evaluate several things at once—an object’s value in relation to its price, their personal need for that object, how it looked on their head or wrist or dangling from their tan-lined shoulder, how comfortable they were with the knowledge that the object was a replica, and how to deal with this knowledge, whether to allow others to draw their own conclusions or tell everyone, including those who didn’t ask, that only four dollars had been spent.

  A mere shpritz of adrenaline cut Pasha’s whole system off from power. He proceeded to stand, blink, and stroke his beard. Grabbing hold of Pasha’s hand, Marina led the way, exasperated by the situation. She’d been employing all her powers of persuasion to push the department-store experience—they could go to a store like Macy’s for good-quality apparel, something practical and useful so that he wouldn’t always be walking around in ill-fitting hand-me-downs, where they’d also find something for Sanya—a cool pair of jeans, a denim jacket—not to mention that Nadia couldn’t be completely overlooked. But Pasha wanted a watch, and only Canal Street would do. This galled Marina. The entire business was distasteful, like the way her friends bought dresses from Saks only to wear them once, then return for a full refund. Not Marina. Since she didn’t have the means for brand names, she’d do without.

  If a stigma was involved, Pasha didn’t seem concerned. Marina gave other options—Kings Highway was lined with stores that sold elegant, inexpensive watches. Look at Levik’s. So it’s not Swiss-made. Who can tell the difference? Like talking to a wall.

  They exited the purse forest, entered a field of dial faces. Ugly fungal watches sprouted from wooden crates, plastic tables, suitcases propped on fire hydrants. Vendors kept up a steady barrage of hushed solicitation. A few reached out and grabbed. Marina shook off their Hey, miss! and Hey, lady!, knobby fingers, musky smells. It felt like Turkey, 1983. The fear, the shame, the disgust. She stopped abruptly. Her own fingers, giving Pasha much reassurance, unclamped. Go ahead, she hissed, pick.

  Pasha weighed a few options but didn’t delay, plucking the most sparkle-studded, yellow-bright Rollex in the batch.

  Marina relied on facial contortion to communicate her feelings. Pasha advised she buy a pair of sunglasses; there was no shortage of options. Voice would have to deliver. You want that? she said.

  You prefer another?

  They’re all hideous, Pasha, but that’s an absolute monstrosity. She glumly lifted the flap of her crappy-but-honest purse, proffering a five-dollar bill like a crumpled sock. I just don’t get what this is about, she said.

  Pasha’s wrist held out, Marina fastened the clasp. Tutoring, he said.

  Marina failed to comprehend. Releasing Pasha’s arm, she recalled walking out along a narrow pier so high that the water underneath wasn’t visible and holding tightly on to the arm of a man who wasn’t Levik. She stared at his neck as he stared at a tiny cargo ship wrapped in silky flame. There was a terrible screeching sound as he lifted his other hand, in which he held a dirt-caked shovel. Oh, said Marina. For the mothers?

  Mothers weren’t the issue. Pasha could get work from them regardless. The watch was for the kids, hardly a fitting term for two hundred fifty pounds of pure muscle—adults with deficiencies, a more apt description. They were practically illiterate, spoiled, hopeless, but what else was new? The problem was a rampant obsession with status. At the whiff of financial desperation (and why else would anyone tutor?), they stopped being bored, became vicious. You didn’t have to be a hound to smell it on Pasha. In perhaps their only demonstration of logical reasoning, they figured, if you’re poor, I should be learning how to not be like you. The watch would take care of that. He’d just have to remember to stash it in his pocket before going to the institute, so as not to upset the doctors.

  They walked a few blocks north, tending their thoughts. Where next? asked Marina.

  Her brother was a weak old man, almost forty, couldn’t take more. But if she was ambitious enough to continue to Macy’s, he wouldn’t mind waiting. Were they far from the Frick?

  Speechlessness launched Marina. There she went . . . fiery, short-fused Marina, zooming up the avenue. Her hair looked angry. Pasha could see it from far away, in a dense mass of bobbing heads, by far the angriest hair. Each strand a heated needle. She stopped on the corner, pressed her back to the traffic. In a state, she forgot herself completely. Her arms, too tense to rest at her sides, froze at odd angles, as if she were beg
inning to lift off. Her eyes searched frantically for Pasha, finding him only when he’d blocked her sun.

  • • •

  THE SILVERY GLEAM under the couch had been spotted by Frida as she was being ushered off to day camp without a second to spare. Eight agonizing hours of locker-room changing, double-line forming, bologna-sandwich deconstructing, backflip attempting later, when let into the apartment again by Miss Gala, the severe emerald-eyed lady substituting for Esther in pickup duties on hospital days, Frida made a beeline for that couch. All that anticipation proved not for naught. Silvery gleam had weight.

  The necklace’s appealing qualities (in order from least to most): It was chunky, it had a clasp, it accentuated her breasts. In the bathroom mirror, she kept track of the day-to-day changes. The areolas were fluffy and light pink like inside a conch shell, but the surrounding whiteness, what Frida understood to be actual breast, refused to un-cling from her rib cage. Pushing them together was no more possible than making a joint eye. The first thing that greeted Frida in the bathroom was disappointment, but by the time she unlocked the door, letting in whichever crazed family member had been trying to knock it down, she felt herself the owner of a real set of boobs. There was nothing passive about these mirror sessions. Work was being done, tissue developed. Yet no one mentioned a training bra. To ask for one was against the rules—the world had to offer. The bra had to be deserved. The necklace fell heavily to her navel, on the way outlining each breast, creating visible mounds. Examining herself from every imaginable angle and in all her tank tops of the thinnest cotton, she decided that this time the evidence was irrefutable.

  The corridor came alive not terribly long thereafter, introducing a final unpleasant moment: Miss Gala’s dismissal. Whispers characterized this small event, as Frida was made the subject of a report. Miss Gala was troubled by Frida’s antisocial behavior. When walking out of the Y, Frida tried to fall into step with a group of girls and grimace as if she were interacting, but this tactic didn’t always work, because Miss Gala was no fool. Once the door had slammed behind Miss Gala, Frida could at last make her appearance. It was calculated for effect. The only possible result was the urgent purchase of a training bra. Frida knew the exact one she wanted and where it hung in Berta Department Store.

  After the recent string of days (one thousand one hundred and twenty-seven), Marina’s powers of observation weren’t as sharp as one might hope. Frida, torso puffed, had to go so far as point. Once Marina processed what she was seeing, she leaped in her daughter’s direction, meanwhile maintaining perfect silence. This made her daughter squeal all the louder. Realizing that her mother was a lost cause, Frida turned her chest to her grandma, who was straining to remove her shoes on the creaky piano bench. No need to know what Baba Esther’s words meant to sense the force of profanity. By now her mother, too, had found her voice. Take that thing off! she yelled. Right this instant!

  Mission aborted, Frida ran to the bathroom, turned the lock. How could it be that they’d missed the point entirely? Somehow or other, Baba Esther was to blame—if she wasn’t busy, she was furious. Most of the world slipped under her radar. When she looked at Frida, it wasn’t as one person looked at another, certainly not as a grandma looked at her granddaughter, but as an inspector checking a garment. She was interested only when something was wrong. If Frida had a fever, an ear infection, splinters in her heel, Baba Esther gave her undivided attention. She was visibly disappointed when Frida’s cough wasn’t a cough but a badly swallowed grape. And she never lacked for the proper admonition: I’ve seen many girls just like you asphyxiate because they stuffed their mouths and ran while eating.

  Too discouraged to conduct another mirror session, Frida climbed into the bathtub and stretched out her legs. The necklace rose and subsided with her rib cage. Its weight instilled a lesson. It wasn’t a good lesson, but at least it wasn’t algebra and at least her uncle, to whom she assumed the lesson belonged, as her grandma had yelled his name several times, wasn’t trying to instill it himself. The walls of the bathtub were rounded and white like distant mountains. For a moment she felt as if her surroundings were open and vast, in contrast to her days, which were crowded with buildings and shadows.

  EIGHT

  ROBERT’S YEARLONG SCHEMING had manifested such outward symptoms as an acute mailbox fixation, the revival of dusty desk implementa (magnifying glass, makeshift clipboard, pencil sharpener the size of a pet cat), severe bouts of pharmaceutical-resistant insomnia—all of which Esther and Marina misdiagnosed with dread as stage one in the fulfillment of the mythic memoir project. But they need not have worried about their secrets leaking out through Robert’s pencil. Thanks to his furtive efforts, John Lamborg had translated half the poems in Pasha’s collection. No publisher had taken it on, no lectureship been offered. Robert miraculously kept up the correspondence in Pasha’s name until foolishly mentioning that he would be visiting his family in New York this July. Lamborg read this as an invitation. He’d assumed that they both assumed it was important and inevitable that they meet. Perhaps not entirely unintentionally, Robert had gotten himself into a bind and saw no choice but to disclose to Pasha the details of the entire deception.

  He wasn’t sure what to expect—an outburst of rage at the intrinsic breach of privacy or gratitude at the sight of the translated poems, perhaps one followed by the other. But Pasha took the news as tepidly as he’d taken the letter. He’d never had any intention of responding to Professor Lamborg, having skimmed his letter with a bit of amusement but a lack of any other sensation. The amusement was partly in response to the letter and partly to the attached photograph of the Russian branch of the Slavic department assembled in two paltry rows on a concrete staircase. John Lamborg had forgotten to point himself out, which didn’t make much of a difference, since the four men were identical. Their ruddiness was half fresh air, half rosacea. They had scrawny men’s confined bellies and wore quality sweaters made of wool, the necklines of which were tight and pronounced; perhaps it was this constriction that caused the bloom in their cheeks. If Pasha had been surprised by anything, it was his own boredom.

  Fine! yelled Robert. I’ll cancel the goddamn meeting!

  There’s no need, said Pasha. Calm down, Papa. I’ll go meet the man.

  But the calm was precisely the problem.

  The department photograph must have been a decade old. Lamborg was gaunt, aged in the haphazard way rosy people age. His button-down shirt still had the size sticker on the back (XS), and his hair looked like freshly mowed grass. It was for this occasion that the man had cleaned up. Having little to present to Pasha, Lamborg wanted to be presentable himself. He must have thought that all these months Pasha had been awaiting news of an English-language publisher.

  They met in Brighton, a neighborhood whose pulse Lamborg made a point to check at least once a year. Pasha professed ignorance, and it was Lamborg who ended up showing Pasha around, leading the way to a restaurant-café that served the most delicate blintzes. A rheumatic finger pointed out that over there was the most sinus-excavating plov and here the airiest meringue, while two blocks up stood white vats of the crunchiest pickles. The only men Pasha knew with such an investment in the matter were grotesquely obese—they ate all day long, did little else—yet even they were less expert in the field. And here was Lamborg, a chopstick of a man, warning Pasha never to buy Korean carrot salad from Gold Label but only from Taste of Russia, which, on the other hand, used the worst dough for its frozen pelmeni. All in utter earnestness, not a hint of sarcasm, not a measly grin. Lamborg was disappointed at Pasha’s inability to supply new tips or fill lacunae like Brighton breakfast fare. The only gastronomic wisdom Pasha could muster was that it was truly uncanny how much the food here was like that in Odessa, the only divergence being in abundance. He kept at it until he’d talked himself into admitting how disturbing and pathetic he found Brighton, though he actually didn’t feel one way or another.

  They burrowed into a corner table under a ti
ny but very deep TV soundlessly projecting a football match. Lamborg itched for the chance to halt Pasha’s menu inspection if only Pasha showed some sign of noticing the menu or any awareness that such a thing existed. Eventually Lamborg simply caught a moment when Pasha’s gaze drifted and said, Don’t bother with that, I’ll order for us, which he did in proud, overstated Russian that failed to arouse admiration in the waiter with black eyes glued to the TV.

  Pasha kept Lamborg from ordering chak-chak, Lamborg’s favorite dessert, and invited him back to the apartment. These were the instructions he’d received. Lamborg didn’t protest—he was a collector of Russian household experiences. He entered the building lobby and began to systematically take note, inspecting the floor tiles, plants, odd ceramic bowls, and how they were all used in equal measure as ashtrays.

  Pasha was caught off guard by what he discovered at home. The apartment was clean. The dining table had been transplanted to the living room (Pasha’s foldout cot had disappeared, as had his suitcase) and covered with a celebratory cloth, on top of which stood a city of saucers filled with jams and tiny treats. This was Esther’s fancy china set, only admired from behind the glass door of a cabinet, until now. His family members were scrubbed to a shine and dressed in their finest. Lamborg himself was surprised by the magnitude of the reception. Sweat stains deepened the blue of his shirt, and his lips receded, exposing horsey teeth that didn’t suit his face at all.