Hardly more than our usual Sunday lunch, said Esther, waving away the concern.
Pasha took Marina aside. Number one, what is all this? Number two, I told you we were going out to eat. Number three, whose idea was this?
Not an ounce of gratitude! You’d think we were doing something horrible. If you really want to know, Papa ordered this up. And it’s for Frida as much as for you.
Frida was by then a big girl three months shy of eleven. She had to be impressive when the man from Cambridge came to lunch. Expectations were low. Impressive applied to Frida meant that she wear a dress and sit at the table. No one expected smiles, precocious conversation, grace. She wouldn’t have to use a knife. Even a fork was optional. The man from Cambridge didn’t need to leave with a distinct impression of Frida. Better he did not. When a few years later she would be applying to Harvard, he should be able to remember, upon gentle prodding, that sunny Sunday afternoon, that immaculate lunch, that delightful, generous, expansive family of the poet Pavel Nasmertov, and his niece, who just blended into the background, did nothing jarring or off-putting, was in no way insane, misbehaved, or emotionally corrosive, neither capricious nor foul, and so must have been quiet, reserved, and mature, traits meriting acceptance to America’s most prestigious institution of higher learning. It would be the least John Lamborg could do after a block of black caviar.
But along with a dress, a proper young lady must wear stockings. No two ways about that. Frida’s lumpy, bruised legs, her knees of picked scabs never allowed to heal, couldn’t just stick out of her dress. It was a hot day, and just looking at the shiny, airless material created a frantic itch. Frida whimpered and clawed at her flesh. There was a lot of meat to pack into those sausage casings, and Frida didn’t deal well with constriction. She wore shoes two sizes too large for her feet, confounding the salesladies with their measuring devices. For months she hadn’t allowed a comb near her hair, which grew increasingly lopsided, tangled, lackluster and shaggy, until a bloated white bug stepped out onto the balcony of her forehead. All of it had to be chopped off. It was growing back frizzy and brownish and currently fell just past her ears, her large ears that also seemed to have fought their way out of confinement, to freedom.
After ten too-good-to-be-true minutes at the table, Frida began to fidget. This during the routine immigration narrative they were replaying for their guest, who’d certainly heard a thousand such narratives with a peppering of charming details like how Marina had thought that in America she would work as a professional clairvoyant because around that time Barbra Streisand gave an interview in which she said she never went anywhere without her personal fortune-teller, Tatiana, and the hearsay was that after that all the wealthy women in Manhattan wanted their own Eastern European fortune-tellers, so instead of learning English in the time leading up to their departure, Marina learned to read palms and Turkish-coffee grounds and was embarking on tarot cards and astrological charts. She usually told the story better—Frida’s writhing and squirming distracted.
Lamborg abruptly turned to Frida. What about you, he said, do you like it here?
It was difficult to fathom a more catastrophically off-the-mark question. Here—as opposed to where? If there had been a somewhere else, Frida was currently engaged in an immense struggle to extract every last trace of it from her DNA. The writhing stopped. She looked at the man dead-on from under hooded eyelids. Without uttering a word, without needing to, she made it all too plain just what she thought of him.
She’s timid, said Esther. Needs time to warm to strangers.
Answer the man’s question, said Marina.
It’s OK, said the man, she doesn’t have to.
Actually, she does have to.
Just a very sensitive girl, said Esther. Will become a pediatrician one day, just like Grandma.
Frida rose partially off her chair as if about to charge. But she didn’t—she stayed in what appeared to be a very uncomfortable half-squatting position and lifted her hand, in which something beige was balled up. She flung this ball, which unraveled midflight, at Marina’s face. The stockings didn’t quite reach the face, landing weightlessly across Marina’s plate. Frida glanced nervously at Pasha, as if expecting him to appreciate the act, to laugh perhaps, or also toss some nearby object. When he did neither, his face remaining impassive, his gaze motionless, she ran out of the living room on lumpy, bruised legs.
Anecdotes are good, was Robert’s take. His temperament was conducive to seeing the big picture. Seven years would be sufficient for any residual unpleasantness to wear off. Bitter aftertastes had relatively short half-lives. In six years’ time, when John Lamborg would be reminded of Frida’s stocking fling, you know what he would do? Laugh! Everything falls into perspective. What appears to be a tragedy now will be repackaged as a light anecdote, a bit of color—crumpled stockings in Marina’s plate of glistening caviar. Answer me this, if the encounter had gone smoothly, what reason would there be to remember it?
Of course, there was no guarantee that in six years John Lamborg would even be alive. The man drank a good deal.
Levik had been ordered to pull out the vintage merlot they’d gotten as a welcome–to–the–New World gift from their distant New World relatives (scattered in the mansioned pine forests of New Jersey) and which served, it seemed, as a sort of bribe—we will give you an outrageous bottle of wine the likes of which you’ve never tasted, even though the odds you’re able to discern the notes of vanilla oak and black truffle and hints of plum cassis on the finish are slim, and in exchange you’ll never ask us for anything or expect any sort of relationship or call on the holidays. Levik’s hands shook violently as he uncorked. He was going through the actions as told, but it was taking profound control to tune out the internal hiccup—Don’t, don’t, don’t.
Such a deep nuanced red came out of the tender opening as Levik poured.
A coy look came over the guest’s face. What’s this, he said, a Russian household with no vodka?
God forbid. Levik rummaged around behind the radiator that during the winter gave off, if anything, frost, and introduced a family-size bottle of the clear stuff.
And they’d been under the impression that Americans didn’t drink. Lamborg’s shot glass existed in a perpetually drained, expectant state. Just refilling it (without drawing too much attention to the refilling) was a full-time job. Lamborg had taken to heart the custom that it was rude to drink when a toast wasn’t being offered. The Nasmertovs had proposed one or two at the meal’s commencement—concise, practical, for health and wealth. But then Lamborg made a few increasingly far-fetched toasts himself—to enviable households, to new countries and new friends, white nights and black seas—and they realized with horror that they were supposed to keep cranking out the toasts so their guest could keep imbibing. Three-quarters of the bottle (which was the size of a child’s leg) disappeared with practically no help from them.
Frida had expected the stranger to leave in an hour, two at most. During her brief stint at the table, she had been too uncomfortable and indignant to eat. Once the adrenaline from the tantrum subsided, she found that she was starving. But you don’t throw stockings at your mother’s face in front of an important visitor you’re supposed to be impressing only to return an hour later for some pelmeni. She remembered all the delicacies on the table. Esther’s homemade cherry vareniki in thick crimson sauce had virtually disappeared from their culinary repertoire as of late. They were labor-intensive, and the cherries here were not like the cherries grown back on their dacha. But the vareniki were currently in a bowl on that table in the living room, to which Frida could possibly very quietly return once the visitor was gone. She had pride. She would starve to death before facing that man again. And starve she would, because the hours kept passing with no sign of his departure. If the visitor were making an exit, the entire family would escort him to the end of the corridor, where they’d orchestrate a loud, festive, dramatic, prolonged farewell—to seal in the specialne
ss of the occasion and properly launch it up the memory chute. So Frida was prepared to overhear the finale, which, like any proper climax, would be audible through a closed door, a door to which she pressed her ear every quarter hour. What the hell was going on out there? The silence stretched for so long and the cherry sauce grew so vivid that Frida suddenly thought, Maybe I fell asleep without realizing and in the meantime the visitor left? So she cracked her door a smidgen and peeked—to find the visitor’s shoes waiting under the mirror. Murmurings leaked out, there was the scrape of porcelain, a muffled cough. She almost succumbed to the urge to rush into the living room and grab as many vareniki as she could with her hands—but they were slippery, they’d slide out. She shut the door and sank into despair.
The knob turned. Esther stuck in her head.
Are you hungry?
No, said Frida. I hate you.
Not even for some cherry vareniki?
Esther was unexpected in the role of savior. Usually she was the one advocating for harsher measures and stricter policies, being of the opinion that naughty girls who don’t respect their elders must be taught a lesson and that once you set out to teach a lesson, Marina, you have to go through with it. Marina had a tendency to cave the instant her initial rage subsided. Then it was all kisses, togetherness, laughs—to absolutely no disciplinary result. Mixed messages only made a more stubborn monster out of Frida. When the door opened and it wasn’t Marina, Frida felt a flare of reinvigorated anger, as if her mother had broken a promise to relent. But here was Esther with her gray face and ratty wig, her sticky sweat and palpable not-wellness, offering Frida not just sustenance but assistance in taking the first step toward a return to public life. A shame—Frida preferred to regard her grandma as the enemy.
Where’d he go? asked Frida.
Still here.
He’s an idiot, said Frida, intending to anger.
And a drunk, said Esther.
• • •
PASHA SAW THE ÉMIGRÉ POETS—Renata Ostraya, Nurzhan Bozhko, Andrei Fishman, Efim and Sofya Milturn—finding them, to his surprise, every bit as lively as he had the summer before. This time they came to Brighton, as Pasha didn’t want to leave his mother for the entire evening. He thought his refusal to traverse the Brooklyn Bridge would mean that he wouldn’t get to see them, but they scrapped their plans and boarded the train, emerging boisterous and rowdy. Pasha was apparently providing them with an opportunity for adventure. They approached Brighton with the attitude that it was hilarious and exotic. They were strictly explorers, anthropologists in an absurd land. Of course a good anthropologist must participate fully in the local customs, no matter how bizarre. Once they got off the train, they piled into the nearest gastronom and loaded up on cheap liter bottles of Ukrainian beer and kvass, filled containers with pickled cabbage and tomatoes, grabbed packets of dried salted fish, then stopped off at the liquor store for that very thing a Russian household couldn’t do without. Provisions in hand, they made straight for the shore, for a picnic in the moonlight.
Pasha followed along, feeling vague stirrings of resentment. This was a real neighborhood where people lived, people with families and tight budgets and, furthermore, people who spoke and read in the language in which they wrote. No reason to feel so high-and-mighty, to act like the nobleman who’d put on a peasant’s frock to play the part for a night. And his mother was sick—one block away, she lay in bed, vomiting into a tub. Pasha wasn’t in disguise. But then they were creeping along on night-trampled sand about as redolent of nature as a bath mat. After finding a spot to settle, he was able to relax. It was as if he’d been collecting evidence against them into a plastic bag that was punctured by one of the ubiquitous glass shards when he plopped onto the sand. All evidence leaked out into the ocean. It was a nice night. So much so that Pasha, after a long sigh, said, What a nice night. Who was it that said one must make a habit of saying aloud when something is nice?
My uncle Dodya, for one, said Sofya Milturn. She’d grown appealing in the dark. What the moon did to the ocean’s surface it also did to her hair, illuming a path through the smoothness and ripples. In the light she was gawky, boyish, angular, but now she was lithe—a clean, elegant silhouette. Ostraya was out of her element, breathing heavily and trying to unstick individual sand grains from her large white calves. The group honored a pensive period. But they drank steadily throughout and were returned to rowdiness.
Fishman drummed on an overturned garbage can, Renata accompanied in song, while Pasha told of the time he got caught in a twister and made the chance discovery of an elaborate under-the-boardwalk world—tunnels, stoves, birdcages.
Care to show us? said Bozhko.
Pasha didn’t, really.
Come on.
Pasha leaned back, digging his elbows into the sand.
What, are you afraid? Or have you just been using your creative license?
I’m using my go-fuck-yourself license, Pasha said and laid down his head. The sky pulsed with airplanes, one of which was supposed to have been taking him home. Tonight had been his return flight, before they’d extended his ticket. This was accomplished in a manner of complicit silence, a refusal to allow meaning to enter. The pretense was that he could spend more time with Esther, but time with Esther had become unendurable. Her waking hours were devoted to a frantic demand for additional treatment. As she saw it, the doctors were deliberately depriving her of the one treatment that would overcome her disease. Her family was at best not trying hard enough to get her this elixir; at worst they were in on the plan. There’s a conspiracy against me, she claimed. Up until then, she’d been rational to a fault.
A heavy object dropped onto Pasha’s shoulder—Renata’s head. It wiggled until his arm unglued from the side of his body, became a cradle. Pasha’s armpit announced, The sky is the underside of an old mattress with a monstrously obese owner who never gets out of bed.
Pasha, inexplicably overcome with tenderness, kissed the top of her head.
The sky is a turtle’s turd, said Bozhko.
The skinny-dipping was Sofya’s idea. It was turning out to be her night. Only her husband, Efim, hesitated. He was useful to the crowd in that he provided the brakes. Fishman, occasionally Ostraya and Sofya, constituted the engine, and everybody else gave color to the ride. If you just looked at Fishman, you’d never suspect the frenzy of sexual energy within him, the need that could never be satisfied for long. He looked extraordinarily plain and middle-aged: beady eyes, a nose like a nose, no lips. The face was very red, overheated, which was the only sign that beneath the surface was a barely contained fire that had settled into the most unlikely candidate. Fishman was engaged in a never-ending battle with his own odd physical manifestation, but he had it in him to fight fifty battles at once and simultaneously charm the ladies, because if he wasn’t doing that, what was the point of any of it? Along the way he charmed Pasha, who usually had a hard time tolerating the energetic types. But Fishman was less like an overgrown child, the way the majority of these types came off, more like a man in the thick of existence, encompassing all inlaid hypocrisies, chauvinisms, victories, fetishes, guilt.
After experiencing the ocean’s cool, slimy touch on every part of their bodies, they returned to the blanket. Only after falling down upon it and releasing a bit of a middle-aged sigh that betrayed the extent of their previous exertion and their joy at the support of the hard sand allowing their lower backs to release, did they find that their party was greatly diminished. Two were missing. There were whispers. Efim looked around with a dull gaze of incomprehension, then alarm. Where’s my wife—she drowned? That would’ve been nice. Neither was Fishman’s labored breathing to be heard among the pack. Two interlocked shadows disturbed the equanimity of the water, luckily out of the moonlight’s path. Occasionally Sofya’s hair caught it. Everybody on the sand felt insufficient somehow, so they had a conversation about literature, digging small holes with unconscious effort.
None of it affected Pasha too deep
ly. He was the observer, the anthropologist, not them. They, in fact, had it all wrong. But in this role Pasha missed a few nuances. He left with the impression that the night had been a success, whereas they might’ve been more reserved in their evaluations.
Regardless, the night served its function, casually reminding Pasha of America’s positive attributes. Immigrating wouldn’t be so bad, now, would it? He had friends. They were lively and witty. And they were somehow not overly discouraged by the predicament of writing in a different language from the one spoken on the street, perhaps because the language most seldom spoken was English. His family was here. And who knows, maybe Sanya would make a lot of money and support them—he had done that thing with the batteries. The situation in Odessa, meanwhile, was only getting worse. A systematic deterioration defined every arena of life: Pasha’s beloved bookstore had overnight transformed into a casino whose metallic windows reflected his confounded face; the only other poet he tolerated in the entire city had frozen to death last March in a drunken stupor outside the doors of another casino; those coffee-flavored sucking candies had disappeared from markets, and in a way they had been his sole joy.
Back at the apartment, the stench of vomit clung to the air. Pasha found all the lights turned on, needlessly overlapping, imparting an aggressive sheen, while everyone had fallen asleep strewn about the rooms. Robert sat at the kitchen table clutching the handle of a cup of tepid tea, his large head wedged into the crook of his elbow. Marina was slumped on the toilet seat, an anatomy textbook in her lap, forehead resting on the sink bowl. Frida lay in soapy bathwater, chin hooked on tub’s edge. Levik had been tinkering with the TV’s wiring when he’d dozed off. Esther still clung to the plastic tub, recently emptied and glistening wetly, which was settled on the summit of her stomach. Pasha set it aside and laid his head there instead. Nothing moved. Everything was perfectly, peacefully still.
Panic in a Suitcase: A Novel Page 13
