Panic in a Suitcase: A Novel

by Yelena Akhtiorskaya

  And what is that?

  Do you think Pasha has a clue what he wants himself?

  A glass of mineral water would be nice, said Pasha, finding pleasure everywhere this morning.

  Treacherous heat notwithstanding, they decided to venture out for a stroll. There were too many of them, no air-conditioning. The apartment’s single window, a porthole situated over the sink, was reminiscent of a jail-cell aperture in that it served a strictly psychological function. Besides, Frida had just arrived—wasn’t she curious to take a look around? Mark Twain had been. There was the Opera House, Potemkin Steps, Vorontsov Palace, Railway Station. With every additional proper noun plucked from the air, Frida felt more jet-lagged. Odessa had more obligatory sights than London, Paris, and Rome combined. How could one miss out on seeing the building in which Ilf and Petrov were born, the synagogue that Babel may have once set foot in, the synagogue that Babel would never have set foot in, the Pushkin monument, the hidden Pushkin mementos, the black velvet drape where a Caravaggio used to hang? Luckily, there was time. If it was used wisely, Frida might be able to see a fair amount. The information was contradictory to say the least. Odessa was a backwater town, delusional province, cultural wasteland, Pasha said as much, yet Frida’s twelve-day visit wasn’t enough to cover everything. A hollow shell of a city, claimed the patron saint himself, but Frida was clearly at fault for not displaying a sufficient measure of curiosity toward it. Was her presence there not curiosity enough?

  The pirate, who outside Frida’s thoughts went by Tochka, wasn’t made for the heat. He promptly began to melt. First his mustache became a viscous puddle that migrated south and poured drip by agonizing drip off his chin, staining the soaked-to-transparency dress shirt, the ruffles of which had wilted. Decomposing eyebrows obstructed vision, making it rather a challenge to ambulate. Nobody was very surprised when he muttered an unintelligible excuse and veered perpendicular on a side street. Pasha didn’t appear to notice that their party had shrunk. His heels scraped the pavement. Sveta bounced alongside. Frida craned her neck, occasionally making an affirmative throat sound or venturing an architecture-related inquiry. The answers got lost somewhere. The surroundings were blurred by exhaustion and gastric discomfort (Sveta had made lunch; report on cooking not positive). Frida was cotton-mouthed and angry with herself. The people they passed either looked at Pasha and uttered cordial hellos or looked at Pasha and whispered something to their companions. All signs pointed to the fact that Pasha’s eyes were open and functional—he heeded curbs, avoided dog poop (sometimes), paused at stop signs—but he gave no hint of noticing the people who noticed him. Those who greeted him and those who didn’t received the same treatment—namely, no response at all, not even an ear twitch. Impenetrably sullen, he scraped onward. Frida shot a pleading look at Sveta. You had to give it to her, Sveta tried her best—she pulled Pasha’s beard, tickled the mossy nape of his neck, bit his shoulder, gnawed at his elbow, none of which revived the walking corpse.

  They entered a small park, following a narrow, swerving path lined with reassuring oaks that opened out onto a square with a cathedral and a fountain, and Frida felt a swell. I remember this! she cried.

  The Sobornaya? clarified Sveta.

  Ded took me here. I rode those swings. We fed two sad goats right there by that statue.

  Full-scale renovation three years ago, said Pasha. When you left, there was nothing here but a dilapidated cathedral—no swings, no statue, and I greatly doubt the goats.

  They did a nice job, though, didn’t they? said Sveta. They even put in trash cans. Not nearly enough, but it’s a start.

  • • •

  IT WAS THE SORT of place that required an introducer. Frida could’ve passed by fifty times without noticing. If asked, she’d guess that in its place was a post office, but this would be pure speculation. Though Gogol Street was rather touristy, the particular door was locked by a visual code, rendering it invisible to nonnatives. Not that inside it was anything special. Tables, chairs, a leathery man dozing with one pant leg slung over the other in the far corner. All cafés had that far corner, which belonged to the people you could never become. Perhaps the only notable aspect was the lack of distinguishing characteristics. No decorative flourishes, no menu innovations. It was like a café of the spiritual realm, everything understood implicitly.

  Nobody bothered to take Frida’s order. She was still in the doorway when the prominent waiter brought her a giant glass, more of a vase, jammed with behemoth ice cubes, and several glass bottles of Coca-Cola. The others got small glasses, sans ice, filled with any beverage of their choosing. They had vast and varied preferences—black currant juice, kvass, Borjomi water, Tarkhun, an aloe-lemon concoction, bilberry mors—all of which were in need of diluting; for those purposes there were bottles of vodka and cognac. If that sounds like a lot of drinks for the three of them, it’s because it wasn’t the three of them. The café into which Pasha had led them happened to be packed with his friends—an international group, poets hailing from Petersburg, New York, Berlin, Zurich, Bucharest, Vienna, even Australia. They’d been trickling into Odessa over the past day for the upcoming Conference of Literature, which was just a convenient stop before the main event, a dress rehearsal for the larger, grander, more refined and much-awaited Russian-Georgian poetry festival, Dreams of Georgia, held in Tbilisi, Batumi, Rustavi, and Tskaltubo.

  Is that why you’re here? Are you a poetess yourself? asked a smiley man with psoriatic streaks across his cheeks.

  Oh, no, not at all, not me, said Frida, in a hurry to clarify, as if the possibility of being momentarily mistaken for one were inadmissible, an offense to the very concept of poet, though the way it came off was that it would be an offense to Frida’s conception of herself. Everything seemed to fluster her, as if she’d never encountered the likes of it before. She was finding it impossible not to act frazzled in all instances. Or worse yet, disproportionately impressed. But this was just a guise, was it not? She was giving off an entirely wrong impression, unable to locate the correct one. I’m here for my cousin’s wedding, she told the man as he fiddled with the saltshaker. Pasha’s my uncle.

  Evidently Pasha had failed to share this development with Efim, who claimed to be a dear old friend. He turned to Pasha and overplayed his hurt.

  Pasha shrugged. My son is thirty-five—

  Thirty-two, corrected Sveta.

  He already has kids. And I’ve barely met his bride-to-be, but from the little I’ve seen—

  Efim’s hand signaled Pasha to stop. There was no getting around it. News like this deserved a toast.

  Frida lifted her vase of Coke and clinked timidly, then enthusiastically, with all across the table. Some people at the other end, having caught only the broadcast announcement, eyed her with interest, taking her, perhaps, for the future daughter-in-law. And how about the son himself? Would he be joining them for a celebratory drink? Where was the lucky young man? Pasha didn’t know. Pasha didn’t particularly care. The fuss was disturbing. People became strange when it involved news of this sort. Atavisms were activated. Their personalities abandoned them. They lost their cultivated whims and eccentricities, were reduced to elemental humanness. And they became hungry, wanting access. Pasha, instead of rising to the occasion and putting on the proud-father face, sharing an anecdote or two and accepting a pour of champagne, relenting a little in his absolute Pasha-ness, clenched his antisocial jaw and waited out the awkward moment until the subject was dropped and the table splintered into comfortable disunity.

  Plates like flying saucers began colonizing tables with fantastic speed and adroitness. Food was not only what clung to the tines of the fork but also what filled ears. The corners of Frida’s eyes were salivating. Silverware mishaps, guffaws, the flashing hands of waiters—all were food. A man swayed over a piano, not making music but kneading air. Everything looked scrumptious, yet not entirely edible. No matter what she tried, there was a hint of turned eggplant. It was a while before she l
ooked up. When she did, Pasha was transformed. He’d grown animated and wide-eyed, voluble, dynamic. Flanked by two men, one of them arresting, with geologic features and demonic eyes, an ethnic hat, and an articles-have-been-written-about-me air, the other quite plain, with a puffy pinkish face, large arms, and an ineffable quality—the kind of man to sneak into dreams and tinker with the dreamer’s perception of him. Pasha’s elbows rested on the table. His lower lip was pronounced, like that of a rabbi in a kitchen, painting. When either of the men spoke, Pasha’s eyes lifted to the heavens. He giggled often and abruptly.

  The cloud of cigarette smoke thickened. Frida’s eyes burned, lungs ached, accustomed to American standards. She stepped outside for the closest thing this city had to fresh air, immediately followed by Sveta with her regenerating cigarette. Sveta gave Frida a look of sympathy, as if they were both suffering quietly through this occasion or this life, and exhaled into her face.

  A lady with short orange hair came out to see where Sveta had gone, and in search of the lady with the orange hair came two others, and in a few minutes they were a huddle of gossiping ladies with jarring laughs and warring perfumes. Sveta apologized to Frida because they were being prevented from having a heart-to-heart. Her breath was pungent and the cracks of her lips stained blue. A Mediterranean wind turned the corner. Sveta’s unnaturally rigid hair split open, exposing a deformed ear. Frida studied it, mesmerized. But it was quickly returned to its box of hair, hidden away like all things of interest.

  Frida’s phone rang—could it finally be Sanya, the lucky young man, the closest thing she had to a brother, whose adult voice she had yet to hear? Against all odds she succeeded in a casual allo. But it wasn’t Sanya. Once again she found herself being shouted at. It seemed not threatening but somehow informative. Not an ounce of meaning could be extracted. This time she felt that she deserved this treatment and that everybody knew she was getting it. But when she looked around, everybody was gone, the huddle of women dispersed; she stood alone on a curb across the street from a casino. There were no stars or cats, no excuses to linger.

  Returning to the table, Frida overheard an unpleasant snippet in which Sveta was pointed at and referred to, in surreptitious English, as the Bride of Frankenstein. Then, during a baffling search for the restroom, Frida stumbled into Pasha being called, and not even with the decency of a whisper, a royal asshole suffering from a Jesus complex. She bent down to adjust a sandal strap. Pasha did have some talent, there was no denying that, but his poetic views were egregiously conservative. There were good poems, but there were too many poems—inspiration didn’t visit anybody on such a regular basis. And apparently he beat his ex-wife, but who wouldn’t have?

  In the bathroom, three flights up and technically in a different building, yawning wives professed with pride to an inability to sleep in planes, trains, and automobiles, enthusiastically enumerating neuroses while a tall lady in a lavish gown vomited into the sink. Squeezing through a narrow, jagged passageway made by the backs of chairs, Frida’s butt was pinched. Her response was lethargic. A somnambulist would’ve about-faced quicker. The perpetrator was the plain man with the puffy face. He recoiled, reddening, but it did no good—slyness was built into the curve of his nonexistent lips. Zeal, for everything, oozed from his pores.

  Pardon, mademoiselle, he said, and pointed to the woman for whom the pinch had been intended. Two sensations overcame Frida: horror that her butt was interchangeable with that matronly derriere, and love . . .

  Of course out of everyone I had to pick Pasha’s future daughter-in-law to harass. He already thinks I’m a creep.

  I’m not—

  Going to tell? If you want, I can do it again.

  That’s OK, said Frida, maybe some other time.

  Good luck to you. You’re marrying into literary aristocracy!

  Frida smiled sweetly, but the words left her feeling unsettled in a Shakespearean sort of way, as if everybody were in cloaks and disguises, saying one thing, meaning another.

  Unlike all the moths in the light, Pasha stayed in the same seat with his elbows on the table. Frida, in the dual role of Niece and Daughter-in-Law, became a routine pit stop for the poets. One by one they came to tell her in what high esteem they held Pavel Robertovich. Her uncle was the Brodsky-of-our-time, dorogoy drug i velikiy poét (a dear friend and great poet), whose poetry built emotion through a fantastic accrual of detail, whose situation in Odessa was an impossible one, and were he not such an obstinate, principled, intransigent man, he would’ve left Odessa long ago; that this town had been abandoned by history and didn’t need a martyr in the shape of an aging, bearded Russian-Jewish-Christian poet (though it is quite charming when you think about it); that he should’ve moved to New York or at least Moscow, cosmopolitan cities in which he had friends, readers, supporters ready to help him in any way they could, where he could meet more like-minded people, or at least those with common interests and thicker wallets and an appreciation, no matter how misguided, for what he was doing, for what was essentially his life project; that though ideally he should’ve made this move decades ago, it still wasn’t too late—however, there was no point in telling him this, he simply wouldn’t listen, the man couldn’t be reasoned with; that in Odessa he had only enemies and his tactic of ignoring them for half the year, then launching ferocious, no-longer-relevant counterattacks on his LiveJournal page during the other half was just making these enemies more rabid; that he wasn’t taking proper care of himself and looked far worse this year than he had the last (this surprised Frida—her uncle seemed incapable of looking better or worse, as if centuries couldn’t touch him); that Sveta should put him on a diet; that he had never before seemed so happy with his domestic situation, and thank God he’d finally gotten rid of that snake Nadia; that a lot of people may be saying things to her about Pasha but not even all of his friends, so-called, had his best interests in mind, and it would be wise for her to listen with a grain of salt; that particularly the Berlin group had to be kept an eye on; that it’s not hard to understand why people got so sentimental about Odessa; that in fact it was impossible to understand; that perhaps what annoyed people most was that Pavel Robertovich didn’t drink like a real poet; that what possibly irritated some was that Pasha never gave praise, or at least was terribly stingy in that department; that he refused to gossip; that according to him everything fell under the rubric of gossip; that he never met anybody on the other person’s terms; that he expected others to read his work but didn’t take the time to read theirs; that people were fallible, and such things got to them; that she, Frida, actually bore a resemblance to her uncle, which wasn’t immediately obvious but emerged upon speaking to her, as she somehow had the same manner, the way she held her head, and also something in the eye and forehead region.

  Frida listened, nodding, neck pain. Having spoken their piece, they asked a single question of her. Learning that she wasn’t a poet, not even a prose writer, they returned to their peers. In between these brief encounters, Frida glanced over at her uncle, who kept sitting in that corner with his elbows on the table, and each time he looked a bit altered, enshrouded. Toward evening’s end, the café clearing though it was unclear just how quickly as smoke impaired visibility, an older woman with owl eyes and the matronly derriere to which the pinch rightfully belonged approached Frida. Perfectly sober, she took pride in her controlled manner, as if she were a cheetah that had tamed itself. Studying Frida, she said in English that was accented, mannered, and perfumed, Lawyer or accountant?

  Neither, Frida said quite proudly.

  I didn’t think so. Tell me you’re a dentist and I’m leaving.

  Medical school—just finished my first year.

  Congratulations, said the woman, stifling a yawn.

  But I’m not going back.

  So it gets interesting.

  Frida beamed.

  Your poor parents—they must be heartbroken.

  They don’t know yet, said Frida, trying out a deranged
fantasy on this ridiculous lady. The heartbreak will come later—first it’ll be wrath. But they can’t force me back to school when I’m half the world away.

  So you’re here waiting out the wrath?

  I’m getting to know the family.

  The woman introduced herself. She was Renata. This was said as if it were common knowledge what a Renata was, in theory. Being Renata was like being atheist or vegetarian. Most people gave their names and their hands; they didn’t truly introduce themselves. Renata truly introduced herself. There was a deluge of epithets: poet, essayist, psychoanalyst, wife, mother, mystic, Jew, woman.

  Keep going and you’ll get to dentist, said Frida.

  Are you as incorrigible as your uncle?

  I wouldn’t know. We haven’t exactly been engaging in long conversations—or conversations of any kind, for that matter.

  You see the two men he’s been talking to the entire night? Does it surprise you that they’re the most famous men in the room?

  Yes. Nobody here seems famous.

  Renata sighed. Nobody was a stranger to her. She dealt in psychological tendencies.

  Whatever you’re implying, said Frida, don’t. I’ve heard my fill. Those men look interesting.

  Those men are interesting. What it comes down to is that they’re men.

  So he’s a misogynist as well?

  Have you read Svetlana’s poetry?

  Who’s Svetlana?

  Your aunt.

  Pasha’s wife? Sveta? She’s a poet, too?

  A far more modern and thrilling one than your uncle, if you care for my opinion. I’m not alone in it. Svetlana’s a prodigious talent, but fully eclipsed by your uncle. It’s a shame—all that thwarted potential. Sure he claims to support her writing, the way Picasso might encourage his three-year-old to paint. He’s terribly condescending, and she doesn’t even notice. She worships him. The trouble with me was that I never worshipped him. I considered him an outstanding poet—his early poems were in a different league from the stuff of recent years—and I happily introduced him to the who’s who of the émigré scene. But once I had no more to offer, he washed his hands of me. He stopped writing letters, stopped sending manuscripts. He dedicated a whole collection to me after his last visit to New York, poems I can’t bear to reread. There’s an openness, a frankness, even a dash of romanticism. I’ve decided that I myself invested the poems with earnestness. Pasha would like to be an earnest man, but he’s not an earnest man. Perhaps that’s a central conflict. He’s not earnest, nor is he full of faith. You know what he’s full of? Himself. But don’t be lazy. Read your uncle’s poetry, especially his first collection—you may find it interesting—it’s about your family after all.