Panic in a Suitcase: A Novel

by Yelena Akhtiorskaya

  Lie to only one person—the neighbor at the dacha, Galina Malatok. Tell her we’re millionaires living in a mansion on Park Avenue, sleeping on sheets made of gold fibers, et cetera. Try to impart the opposite impression on your cousin. What is basically the truth. Downplay, better yet don’t mention, all the traveling we do—certainly not a word about the Tuscany vacations. Stay away from Nadia—no one knows what she’s capable of.

  Eat only in the center of town, and nothing with mushrooms.

  Don’t get us souvenirs, don’t worry about us, we’re fine and want you to have a good time and just forget about us, but do get a calling card and call in the evenings—if not, we’ll call you.

  ELEVEN

  SUMMERTIME IN ODESSA was rib cage convulsions, leaden handkerchiefs in pockets, motes of blood in phlegm. Dust consumed the city. The boundary between street and sky was obscured, turned street-to-sky spectrum. People with a cough graduated to a hacking cough, people with a hacking cough advanced to emphysema, those with emphysema hacked their last. It was the land of the ambiguous lung disease, a medley of symptoms that stumped doctors. At least there was always something to talk about, how last night the mucus turned from yellow to green but became less rock hard, how only the right nostril was affected, how it got worse on humid days and better, oddly enough, after a glass of cognac. Going from a wet to a dry cough was an occasion to raise a toast to, sleeping four hours straight a miracle. Then, of course, there was the neighbor with the cough, who put Pasha’s own throat clearing to shame. The neighbor’s cough shook paintings off walls. The chandelier over the bed began to sway at three in the morning. Every night Pasha was certain that by dawn he’d no longer have a neighbor, but the years passed and the neighbor held out. Daylight had an amnesiac quality. It made everyone optimistic.

  Nadia had been a chilling nurse, but to be sick on Sveta’s watch was a pleasure. Pasha lay in bed propped up by pillows and Pushkin, wrapped in fabrics with scents ranging from feminine to outright female. Musky velvet, not death, was on Pasha’s mind. He was fifty-two. Plenty of doctors hadn’t expected him to get this far. Growing up, he’d been surrounded by people terrified of their bodies, people who thought, Well, that was a strange burp, must be something wrong with my large intestine, now it’s really the end; who listened to their bodies in the same way that Sveta, gripping the gutted armrests on their descent into Florence, had listened to the noise of the airplane—with absolutely no knowledge of aeronautics but the conviction that nothing operating correctly would sound like that. Multiple generations of Nasmertovs had gone into medicine to conquer a mystery—the gurgles, throbs, swells, and odors that without technical terms, case studies, textbook sterility grew to monstrous proportions and drove a person to madness. Both aunts on his father’s side had spent the last three decades of their lives incapacitated by hypochondria; his mother had gone through a germophobic spell that culminated in Pasha’s being taken out of second grade and kept home for a year. That year was almost worth it for the psychoanalytic juice squeezed from it later on. As a result Pasha resented close scrutiny of one’s physical climate. But in his last years of living on Potemkin Square—renamed, after a quick monument swap, Catherine the Great Square—he’d gotten into the habit of checking his pulse on the hour and listening to his lungs for the crackle of accumulating fluid. He’d lost the doomed fatalism that had been his shield.

  A steaming bowl appeared on the nightstand, its deliverer dispersed in the vapors. Sveta’s fear was to overdote, her goal to be inconspicuous, better yet invisible. She resembled an impossible bird, one that had fallen out of its nest in infancy, landed on the tail of a dead wildcat (thus beginning a lifelong trend of disaster followed by odd luck, and occasionally vice versa), healed well but idiosyncratically, and been adopted into a family of squirrels not without their own issues. When Pasha caught sight of her, he watched in stunned admiration. Throughout his life Pasha had been starved for solitude, devising plans to keep Nadia occupied and out of the house. Sanya, too. How many times had he planted the seed for a hobby that required fresh air, multiple partners, immobile technologies? Now the opposite was true—Sveta left him alone too much, he was always calling for her. It was his own fault: all those years of complaining. He’d made a habit of unburdening himself to Sveta—how Nadia never left him in peace, asked questions with the sole intent of drawing him from his thoughts, interrogated him when he got home, went through his belongings, rearranged his papers, often not in search of anything, her entire mission being to frustrate Pasha and waste his time on a search. In those days it had taken a lot to disturb Pasha’s equanimity, but she was up to the challenge. Once she had thrown out (and not into the courtyard bin) his favorite, or most reached-for, books, filled with marks and jottings amassed by repeated readings.

  Why would she do that? Sveta had asked, golden-feathered eyebrows twitching in horror.

  For the same reason it enraged her when I sat too long at my desk or got mired in a project—Nadia’s a poet herself. Or she was. When we met, she was being hailed as the next Akhmatova.

  What was she like then?

  She was just nineteen at the time, but her poems were already emerging in the best journals, alongside the top names. Rumor had it that Yevtushenko was terribly smitten with her. He’d tried to woo her and been ruthlessly rejected. I was just getting involved in the samizdat scene. The top journals didn’t impress me. But of course I was intrigued.

  For you, I would’ve rejected Pasternak, said Sveta.

  Poor Pasternak, said Pasha.

  How’d you meet?

  We were introduced on New Year’s Eve in somebody’s freezing basement—icicles hung from the doorway, and the heating tube was encased in a block of ice. The Akhmatova comparison was hardly a stretch. It wasn’t just the similar neoclassical tendencies or preference for rigid forms in their verse. Like Akhmatova’s, Nadia’s face was as highly structured as her poems, as if sculpted from stone. Her nose even bore that lordly Asiatic bump. She was tall and thin, but with bones like Roman columns—an imposing presence. She had a deep voice and used it sparingly. Whenever she did, it was cause for celebration. I was ready to marry her right then and there.

  She sounds just incredible, said Sveta, almost in a whimper.

  It was only downhill from there.

  The marriage turned sour how soon?

  It took no time at all.

  But Pasha, why?

  Were women who sounded like children attracted to Pasha, or did Pasha encourage women to sound like children? Whichever it was, he indulged. Initially she liked me because I was her secret, he said. She regarded herself as a public figure and tried desperately to abide by a comprehensive list of what a public figure should and shouldn’t do. I was the Jewish kid who couldn’t grow facial hair and trailed her every step. She read my unpublished heaps and saw there was something there, but dissuaded me from showing the poems to others. I probably would’ve come out with a collection a lot sooner if it weren’t for her.

  If I hate her for anything, said Sveta, it’s that!

  On the contrary, I should thank her. Regardless, I was very determined, fanatical—there could’ve been a nuclear disaster and violent revolution simultaneously and I wouldn’t have looked up from my notebook. The dynamic was bound to change. It was inevitable. I wasn’t going to be her secret for long. In the meantime Nadia began doing chores around the house. She blamed me for the fact that she had no time to write. But I never asked her to be a proper housewife. There was this other girl, Dora. Mama was in love with her, and God knows why this Dora wanted me. She would’ve made an excellent Jewish housewife. But I didn’t want an excellent Jewish housewife.

  You never mentioned this Dora. Go on.

  I wanted Nadia, with all her moods. I didn’t expect the next Akhmatova to iron pants or make borscht. All I required was a clean pair of underwear. Her pregnancy filled me with dread. It was the end for her. She knew it, too, and my theory is that’s why she hastened it. Before
Sanya she was still managing to compose a poem or two, however painstakingly. Sanya was an excuse to give up. A good excuse, too—he was one of those shrieking, no-sleep, head-to-toe-rash babies.

  I’ve seen the pictures—he’s adorable!

  A few years later, Nadia’s resentment built to such a pitch that she abruptly quit everything that was maintaining the cohesion of our existence as a family. But by that point there was no more writing for her. The worst was when I tried to encourage her. That’s the distant past! she’d yell. I sacrificed my potential so that you could recognize yours. Banal, prepackaged sentiments neatly wrapped with a bow on top, like she got them at the resentful-wife store. And when she used them, you could tell how much she was tapping into their universal power. She was destroyed and destructive and had to say something.

  What about when Ancestral Belt came out? Was she supportive?

  The book just confirmed her suspicions about the course our lives were taking. She was inwardly gloating. It gave her reason to be more merciless. It should’ve been a great time for me, but it was horrible. That was the summer Mama got sick and I went to visit my family in New York, where I met the most beautiful, delicate, birdlike young lady. Guess who.

  Sveta, said Sveta. But what you’re referring to was our second meeting. The bird lady made no impression whatsoever the first time around.

  The period of Pasha’s life from meeting Nadia to meeting Sveta had been selected for constant retelling. It wasn’t allowed to fade, on the contrary often obtaining an added dose of color. Had Nadia shunned Yevtushenko’s advances in Pasha’s first narration? From Sveta’s exclamations of surprise, horror, disbelief, you’d never guess that this was neither the first nor the tenth time she was hearing the account. Because it was impossible to comprehend—how could Pasha, a poet of genius, a sensitive, intelligent, loving, extraordinary man, have ended up in such a hellish entanglement? It didn’t make sense. Pasha was made to revisit the beginning on a regular basis, and Nadia got to be ever more celebrated and beautiful. Hearing this didn’t upset Sveta. It shed light on the unambiguous tragedy of Pasha’s life. He’d been tricked into marriage!

  During the years of Pasha’s complaining, Sveta had indeed been taking notes. She was mindful not to repeat Nadia’s offenses—there were no inquiries as to Pasha’s whereabouts, household duties weren’t a suitable topic of conversation, and Pasha’s workspace was sacred ground. He could sit for hours, if need be days, undisturbed. He began to detest the isolation of his desk, preferring to work at the crammed kitchen table while Sveta pranced stoveside.

  Proximity had to be maintained. They always occupied the same tenth of the apartment, and the apartment was small—no wall moldings or ten-meter ceilings, no Turkish rugs, scenic view, ventilation. The old apartment was on the fourth floor, with exaggerated windows overlooking Potemkin Square. This apartment was on the first floor, or not even. You had to step down to enter. The window (the only one was in the kitchen) looked out at crotch level onto a courtyard whose slabs of concrete had proved inadequate to contain a spoiled earth. It was a ditch.

  But the apartment didn’t matter! The old apartment had mattered. This apartment was perfect precisely because it wasn’t the old apartment, which had belonged to the Nasmertovs since midcentury and in which now resided Nadia and a frequently rearranging group of her distant relations. Nadia had turned out to be not just emotionally needy and mentally unstable but vengeful and greedy. Irrelevant—here was Sveta with a plate of cold, slippery herring and a dill-veined boiled potato. Around the house she wore what could only be called a nightie, terminating at upper thigh. She had schoolgirl legs, skinny with shapely knees. Her thighs were bluish and the inner parts always sweaty, as she was a touch knock-kneed. You wouldn’t notice unless you really looked. A shriveled ear poked through her hair. Pasha had grabbed it once at the foggy instant of sexual release, cementing a habit.

  Though their affair had already spanned a decade, Pasha discovered that Sveta spent most of her life in this nightie when they convened domestically last November. By all means an incredible surprise. The nightie had a tattered lace trim and stretched-out shoulder straps worn to a thread. It wasn’t unusual for a breast to pop out. Sveta’s avoidance of bras was as fundamental as her avoidance of complete sentences, black anything, and public functions, and her breasts, though not large, were demanding. They required attention. Basically she was always naked, yet she moved too nimbly and constantly, blurred by motion. The nightie was like a veil being deftly maneuvered. You were never sure if you saw what you thought you saw. If Sveta ever came to a complete stop, the nightie would’ve been revealed for what it was—a worn scrap of fabric insufficient to cover a child’s torso. Pasha had taken it once for a dishrag. He’d wiped his soapy hands on it.

  There was really just one problem with the nightie: Sveta smoked. She had crates of long, slender, minty cigarettes. Pasha’s sensitive lungs deterred her from puffing away in the house. Not even in February had she bothered to throw something over her alabaster shoulders, softer and whiter than the lightly powdered snow, as she stood out on the porch, sometimes wandering into the courtyard if a friendly cat presented itself, and got her fix. The nicotine’s effect was to calm and focus—Sveta was at her most inert when she smoked. The neighbors got a show. On the floor above lived a cadaverous old widower who would’ve kicked the bucket long ago if Sveta in her nightie didn’t revive his pulse on an hourly basis. And to be honest, it was in their interest that he not delay, as he had the more desirable apartment.

  Sveta stood in the doorway, telephone in extended hand. Pasha, piled under three plaid blankets, shivered just from looking at her. What a phenomenon it was, the shiksa constitution.

  Is it Tochka?

  It’s your sister.

  Say I’m not feeling well.

  Sveta covered the mouthpiece. I did. She’s insisting.

  Pasha took the phone, looked at it for a moment, and pressed it to his ear, conchlike, as if awaiting the sounds of the sea.

  Hello-o. Anybody there? asked Marina’s voice, which seemed to live naturally inside the plastic receiver.

  Where else? said Pasha.

  You could speak up. Sveta says you’re still not better. It’s because you don’t take care of yourself.

  Sveta’s taking care of me.

  There was a split second of silence, registered like a pinprick, and a subject switch. Papa’s doing fine, she said. He’s out for a walk. At first he protests, No, I won’t go, I don’t feel well, my hypertension, my constipation, leave me alone, it’s muggy out, but then he thanks me, So nice outside, the sunset, the seagulls. Anyway, he wanted me to ask when you’re planning to go check on the dacha.

  I’ve been bedridden for a week!

  He doesn’t mean right this second. He’s just wondering if you know when you might—

  That man is a broken record.

  That man is eighty years old. Besides, you can’t deny that you’ve hardly spent any time there this year.

  The summer’s barely begun!

  It’s August.

  In my condition, said Pasha, the city’s safer. He was coming to dread these communications, in which the dacha was invariably mentioned—when would they be going, how were the raspberry bushes faring, what about Bym, the neighbor’s blind golden retriever? The Nasmertovs had been gone almost twenty years, yet their questions grew increasingly elaborate, as if they’d gone on a brief vacation and left Pasha the designated caretaker of their property in the interim. Now they were getting suspicious. Throughout the previous summers, when he and Nadia had resided at the dacha, there had been plenty to report about the state of the crops and the neighbors. This year Pasha had no choice but to lie about his visits. Just as Nadia had kept the Potemkin apartment, she had claimed the dacha, which Esther’s parents had purchased with their life savings and considered their treasure, the only valuable possession they could pass on to their daughter. Esther had loved that dacha almost as if it had a heartbe
at. Perhaps Nadia had the capacity to feel a measure of shame—Pasha had surmised this when his father called last week to ask why the dacha’s landline had been disconnected. Pasha was a terrible liar, but his father was begging to be duped. So Pasha obliged. The line had been severed during a freak storm, and they had yet to install a new one. Robert was satisfied. No one would doubt Pasha’s capacity for procrastination. This meant that Nadia—a woman who barged in on Pasha’s poetry seminars at the university to tell him off in front of his impressionable students—didn’t have the courage to inform Robert that she was effectively stealing the dacha from them, that from then on in it was to be a rehabilitation home for her cousins. Nadia had never enjoyed spending time at the dacha herself. It took weeks just to persuade her to leave the city. Her cousins, however, were in permanent need of convalescing by the sea.

  There’s a reason I called, and it wasn’t just to nag, said Marina.

  That’s a relief.

  After a momentary pause, she resumed. It’s about Frida.

  Dad’s briefed me.

  Marina exhaled. Then gave a lighthearted laugh. So you already know?

  That she’s—

  Coming.

  I was under the impression that she was already home. Dad told me she’s not so fond of medical school.

  She’s been home for a while. Summer break in this country begins in the winter and ends in the fall. What I meant was that she’s coming to Odessa. I hope you’re free on Thursday to pick her up from the airport.

  Thursday! cried Pasha.

  TWELVE

  RUSSIAN POETS DIDN’T do airport pickups. They sent their new wives to fetch long-lost nieces. Sveta was more than happy to do it. She didn’t have a car or a driver’s license, but she had an industrious half brother, Volk. He took care of things. He made a cardboard sign that Frida passed by four or five times in a benzodiazepine haze before realizing that the emaciated man with the deviant’s ponytail and mesh camouflage vest was welcoming her.