Panic in a Suitcase: A Novel

by Yelena Akhtiorskaya

  Marina looked at Frida, who interpreted the look as, Please help. But it must’ve had a different meaning, since Marina asked, For free?

  The man grinned. For a kiss.

  Frida got another sideways glance.

  Just kidding. Kiss optional. Like tip. Now turn.

  Marina rolled onto her stomach, wriggled about, spread her breasts to either side, and lay still. The man stood over her, cracking his knuckles dramatically.

  Your sister? he said, pointing at the splotchy flesh on the low bench.

  Daughter. Marina giggled.

  I’ll do her next, he said magnanimously.

  The man’s calves, smooth and hairless, flexed in preparation. Heels lifted. The venik, glistening with painful flashes of veiny branch, slammed down on Marina with great urgency, as if her shoulder blades had just gone up in smoke. Then it stayed there. He pressed down using his entire torso (which actually wasn’t so large—he had a neat, petite frame). When the venik was peeled off, her back was gushing color, flecked with leaf scraps. But there wasn’t a peep to be heard. She simply exhaled.

  That’s all I get? he said. I must be going too easy on you.

  The venik hopped up and down her back like a prima ballerina light on her toes, making good use of the stage, working up the crowd before she really got going. Then it landed with maximal power on the soft underside of Marina’s knees. With a noted delay, she uttered a tiny groan, clearly out of sheer politeness. The man bent over to look at her face. Just checking you’re alive, he said.

  Quite, said Marina, as if she’d taken a sip of tea.

  The man was working for squeals, moans, pleas for mercy, and here was Marina half asleep. It wasn’t much fun this way. He tried harder and harder to draw them out of her, twisting limbs, beating down manically, to no avail. That Frida was making the necessary sounds, the man failed to notice. His heart was no longer in it. He had to stop and catch his breath, while Frida prayed that a snore didn’t emanate from her mother’s direction. When he resumed, it was with the efforts of a demoralized man. A few limp swats later, it was all over. The offer to take Frida next wasn’t renewed.

  Didn’t that hurt? Frida asked as they found the only free table in the lounge area, under the flat-screen broadcasting a soccer match, the soccer match, some undoubtedly pivotal soccer match on which all eyes were glued. At the surrounding tables, steamed and scrubbed-down Slavs were feasting. Their presence reassured. Frida wanted to thank them for their predictability, but they didn’t even acknowledge her existence. They weren’t being insulting; it was just that in her place they saw a continuation of atmosphere.

  Give me a break, said Marina. The boy had no clue what he was doing.

  Marina grabbed the passing busboy holding a stack of dirty dishes up to his chin. He nodded gravely, or maybe just dutifully, to her extensive and improvised list of fruits and vegetables to be squeezed into juices and hurried to the kitchen, situated centrally at the core of the lounge area, itself at the center of the banya, with the various saunas, steam rooms, and massage nooks built along the lounge’s perimeter. The staff that went into and came out of the kitchen included everyone from the bowed cleaning ladies who spoke not a single known language to the presumed new banya owner, with a deep subterranean tan brought about by vigorous, overstimulated blood flow, as he clearly spent his days making full use of his own amenities. The kitchen was more brightly lit than the lounge, which in turn was brighter than the dim saunas, creating a light-filtering effect, and the kitchen doors were kept thrown open (hard to say why they were not simply open), so the surrounding air appeared to glow. Marina and Frida, unsure whether it was acceptable to stare into the kitchen, alternately snuck glances, as it was impossible not to look, first because the peculiar layout forced your eyes there and second because a long time had elapsed since Marina had ordered and they were beginning to suspect that the busboy had forgotten to relay their request to whoever was in charge of the juicing. It was odd: One moment the kitchen was full of people urgently chopping a single carrot, the next moment the chopped carrot lay on the cutting board with no one to attend to it, and that moment lasted a long time, until the carrot seemed to go limp with indifference, whereas before it had given a distinctly alert impression. The effect of the layout was that the people sitting in the lounge were made uncomfortable (in a not entirely unpleasant way) by basically being forced into overseeing the goings-on of the kitchen, an otherwise private space, but the discomfort actually stemmed from the kitchen’s overseeing them. They were in the kitchen, and the people in the kitchen were outside the kitchen. And where, incidentally, was their juice?

  It’s right over there, said Marina. It’s just standing there, all squeezed out, and nobody’s bringing it to us.

  I hear it loses antioxidants quickly, said Frida. Her head inched back as she stole a glimpse and confirmed.

  I’m going to get it, Marina said, and stood, expecting to be stopped. But Frida bit her cheek, and her mother was impelled to action. This she did very slowly, swaying as if slightly drunk. Mere seconds before reaching the kitchen, she was intercepted by a man with blue tattoos across his saggy arms and stooped shoulders and a few on his chest and back, who’d been watching the game so intensely it was a surprise he noticed anything outside the frame. He put one hand tentatively on the outside of Marina’s elbow. Marina flashed her American smile and pointed to the juice standing in plain sight on the kitchen counter several feet away. The man’s gaze did not follow her finger. He nodded and looked deep into Marina’s eyes, said something, and then they separated. The man, whose tattoos were faded and vacant like old stains, sat down and returned to staring at the TV, whereas Marina walked quickly back to the table.

  It’s coming, she said, plopping into her chair with relief. The waiting resumed. No longer the least bit uncomfortable, they fixed the kitchen with a death stare, until hearing a singsong Here-you-go and turning to find a robe-clad woman, just as relaxed, pore-opened, and glowing as they were, with a tray. She set down a large glass of juice the shade of a young boy’s freckles and a large plate of shrimp of roughly the same color. If Marina had been intending to raise hell about the wait, this plate of shrimp confused her into silence. The waitress left, and behind her stood another woman. Frida didn’t notice the switch and said, We didn’t order the shrimp. The woman nodded absently at Frida, then put her hand on Marina’s shoulder and said, Marina!

  Oh, said Marina, Milka!

  They embraced warmly and naturally, with genuine affection, as if they were old friends. But Frida had never met this woman. Or had she? Milka wasn’t exactly a one of a kind; the world wasn’t suffering from a dearth. In every train car sat at least one Milka, not realizing just how loudly she was talking on her cell phone as the tabloid she’d been leafing through slid down her stocking-slippery thigh and plopped onto the icky subway floor. The nail salons of Brooklyn were glutted with Milkas. How did those Italian boutiques with abominably overpriced and nonsensical skirt-pants and sweater-jumpers stay open? Thanks to the Milkas. Whose husband had just left her for a not-even-younger woman? Milka’s! Who had sued the living daylights out of her ex-husband, ending up with a house on a coveted tree-lined street of Manhattan Beach and two cars in the garage, neither of which she knew how to drive? That, too, would be Milka. So Frida may very well have met Milka before, not once and not a dozen times, and if you took into account how many stories she’d heard about her, Milka was practically family.

  Milka wasn’t at the banya alone. A woman like that didn’t leave the house without an entourage. Today it was just the girls—Irena and Riana, who were outside in the smoking area. Milka had just jumped inside to grab the waitress—they’d been there since noon and had worked up an appetite. Those shrimp do look good, said Milka as Frida popped one into her mouth. Frida nodded, the shrimp’s tail sticking out, and bit into the stringy flesh. They weren’t very good, but when the oil coated her lips, it made her feel wholesome, nourished. Not for long. Soon she r
ealized the shrimp stink was following her. Nothing had the capacity to make her as claustrophobic as a stink. Some people differentiated odors, recognizing scents, aromas, fragrances, and for others it was all a stink, be it overcooked, on-its-way-out shellfish or cherry blossoms in bloom.

  It trailed her outside. In the realm of banyas, an outdoor smoking area with enough space for at least four chaise longues was the gold standard. Here it was, the life. Marina already had a cigarette between her lips, her fingers lifted in a tense V shape, ready to clamp down and tug the cigarette from her jaw. Those fingers knew it would be a struggle.

  Irena and Riana had taken the two decent chaises and were laid out ideally for purposes of comparison. But there was not much to it: Irena was a snow pea and Riana was a dame of operatic proportions, and yet they were halves of a single being. In theory Frida had zero tolerance for these bazaar-type ladies, whereas Marina, though not overjoyed about it, maintained these relationships and it stood to reason benefited from them somehow. But here Marina yawned and clawed at the chain-link fence so as not to pass out, whereas Frida was mesmerized, leaning in and listening to their discussion, an elaborate analysis of the most horrific car wreck imaginable, which had supposedly occurred a few days ago on Ocean Parkway between Avenues N and H, with a pileup of cars and numerous fatalities. Frida hadn’t heard about it, probably because she never watched the news and talked to almost nobody. Riana, who had a lordly air, had witnessed the katastrofa, and you could tell by the way her left eyelid twitched as she described the strewn bodies and purple brains that it really had an effect on her, even though she was making a respectable attempt to be objective and detached in her narration.

  Marina suddenly stood upright and said that terrible things happened, but why must we always dwell on them? The women gave dumb stares. Marina tried to elaborate, saying that terrible things had always happened and would always continue to happen whether we dwelled on them or not, so at a nice moment such as this, a very rare moment of leisure for those of us who work like dogs and will probably drop dead long before retirement, it was probably best to think about nice things and try to get a moment’s peace.

  It’s true that we have no control over the horrible things that happen, said Milka, but we have to come to terms with them somehow, don’t we? For example, do you remember that hostage situation above the Brighton Starbucks two weeks ago? Well, that seventeen-year-old girl was my niece.

  No! Irena said in disbelief, as if that girl couldn’t possibly also be a niece. Irena looked as if odd parts of her needed blotting at regular intervals, as if she had to sleep wrapped in a giant paper towel, or not so giant, as she was a tiny woman with no shoulders, just minute protuberances on either side of her neck that should’ve been pushed back in.

  But there are other ways to come to terms with disaster, said Marina, no longer yawning, ways that don’t involve rubbing other people’s faces into the shit of existence, people who paid an arm and a leg for the banya experience in order not to come to terms with anything but to escape, shamelessly escape, the katastrofa that is everyday life.

  I see your point, said Milka. The prices here have gotten outrageous. Every time we come, the old price is crossed out and it’s plus five. Just once I’d like to see it be minus five.

  That’ll be the day, said Riana with a solemn expression that seemed to slip from her control.

  It was pointed out to Frida that a chaise had opened up by the other side of the fence and made clear as day that she should go lie in it instead of persisting to be a silent presence over adult conversation. Frida looked in the direction of the vacated chaise and shuddered. She wrapped the robe tighter around herself as she lay down and shut her eyes.

  She was assumed out of earshot. Conversations were governed by reverse gravity, with the pull created by the absence of the mass. An easy rule to follow would be to never walk out of the room, but it was a touching comment on humanity that people never followed this rule, often leaving rooms for no known reason, as if conceding that it was only fair to give others a chance to talk about them.

  Several far-reaching key words alerted Frida to the fact that her situation was being discussed. They were: Pennsylvania, eight hours, Grandma, Indian and Chinese. When Marina updated friends, acquaintances, strangers in line at the grocery store of her daughter’s life, she liked to stress how grueling the Lake Erie College of Osteopathic Medicine was. The school, of which no one had ever heard (best to keep it that way, said Marina), was more of a labor camp where the inmates were fed grub and made to work morning to night or night to morning, as it quickly became unclear when one ended and the other began. At this point somebody usually made the observation that if it was really such an immense workload under such inhumane conditions, it was a mystery that the school had a graduating class at all. How did these kids survive?

  They didn’t. The graduating class was almost exclusively Indian and Chinese, which isn’t to say that they weren’t humans, only that their will to succeed was unrivaled, or rivaled only by each other’s, and the work ethic that had been instilled in them from an early age was . . . all right, perhaps somewhat inhuman. Such an environment was hard on Fridachka, who’d never been particularly good at science or getting up before noon. But she was intent on becoming a pediatrician, just like her grandma.

  Enough! cried Frida, sitting upright. Will you please do me one favor and not talk about me when I can hear every word you’re saying?

  The entire smoking area turned. Her mother and company were farther than she’d remembered, and the pitying looks on their faces made evident that she’d interrupted a discussion that had nothing to do with her. Lying back, she opened her palms the way her mother did, fingers curled. But relaxation was in short supply at the banya, everyone trying to summon it all at once. Frida got up and freed the chaise for somebody else, knowing somehow that it would remain empty for a long time. She issued a quick, formal apology to her mother in passing, though it came out addressed to Milka. The door whooshed to a close, and Marina’s fingers clamped down on her cigarette, tugging it from her lips, allowing her to begin.

  • • •

  THE ODESSA INSTRUCTIONS became a favorite pastime. Take your own plastic bags to the market or you’ll be charged extra finally explained why every crevice of their apartment was stuffed with used plastic bags. Lists were compiled. Fruits, evidently, had peak seasons. But it wasn’t so simple, because her visit fell at the end of August, a transitional time; some summer fruits might no longer be good, and some fall fruits might already be better. I’ll explain it again, said Marina, exasperated. The maybe fruits, the use-your-own-judgment fruits, Frida was resolved to avoid altogether. They gave her the names and descriptions of women who sold the freshest produce at the privoz, which deciphered the name of the meat market on Brighton Twelfth. The best woman was Laska. She shouldn’t be hard to identify. Unlike the others, Laska was pure skin and bones, and she had an extra-long tooth and a dark, hairy growth across her forehead. But, said Marina, sucking back a mouthful of saliva, she has the best dairy at the lowest prices—of course, more than two decades had gone by, but those women sat there from the time they were little girls in pigtails until their last stroke or heart attack or cirrhosis of the liver. When you find Laska, tell her hello from the pretty but big-nosed girl in the too-short skirts and the too-high heels and the too-low shirts, which was everyone, so stress the nose and that the girl always bought two kilograms of heavy cream and two of sour cream until abruptly in 1991 she disappeared.

  Much more important, however—never stay overnight in the dacha alone. Although there’s a gate with a lock on it so good you can’t open it yourself, there have been incidents. Remember that one time with the metal shutters? How about that other time, in the outhouse? About the dacha we expect a detailed report. You’ll have to be a bit sly. Pasha gets upset whenever we broach the subject. The upkeep of his own beard is too much of a responsibility, so imagine a garden. Who knows what’s happened to o
ur raspberry bushes? The apricot trees, I’m afraid to even mention. Don’t make it obvious that you’re inspecting. Be casual, but privately take note. The easiest thing would be to draw out a little diagram, like a blueprint of the place, and fill in what’s growing where and in what condition. Do approximately the same with Sveta, her physical attributes, her character. Is she taking good care of Pasha? What motivates her? Is she the take-advantage type he’s always been drawn to? How’s her cooking, et cetera? It sounds like a lot, but once you’re there, it’ll come naturally.

  For the feral-dog situation, we recommend peppermint spray. Most of the time, they’re harmless. They congregate around the trash bins but also wherever there’s trash, which is everywhere. Walk fast but not too fast, and don’t look them in the eye, and never run. When you go swimming in the sea, don’t leave your stuff unattended, not even your precious flip-flops. Anyway, you’ll be robbed. Don’t ask so many questions. Visit the cemetery to find your great-grandparents’ graves, though we doubt it’s possible; no one takes care of the Jewish cemetery and Pasha never leaves the city limits, so the tombstones have probably been stolen or overgrown with weeds.

  Beware the tram at night when you’re walking a wee bit tipsy down the road, not realizing it’s behind you until at the last moment, when the horn blows and you manage to jump out of its way, realizing you almost died while the driver waves his fist in the window, though it’s his fault for not fixing the headlights.

  Ask the taxi driver how much it will cost before getting in. Anyway, you’ll be overcharged.

  Avoid the ritzy, snooty crowd on the Twelfth Fountain, but walk around there to see the houses.

  Comb your hair, for God’s sake. Put on a nice dress and lipstick for Sanya’s wedding, and smile—after spending half your life taking care of those teeth, you may as well show them off.

  Visit the Opera House. It’s the most beautiful in all of Europe.