Renata paused, her gaze caught by someone behind Frida. She lowered her lashes, melted into a demure smile. Frida was left alone, sitting in a warm seat over someone’s half-chewed shashlik and lipstick-rimmed wineglass, trapped in a hot, airless rage. Why would Renata just assume that Frida hadn’t dabbled in her uncle’s canon? And how come her parents never told her that Pasha wrote a book about their family? Why hadn’t they given the book to her or asked if she was interested in taking a look at his others? Did they consider her devoid of curiosity? Admittedly, she’d never inquired. When a poem was mentioned or news came of another collection to be published, Frida was seized by an urge to plug her ears and vacate the room. She preferred to be kept in a state of ignorance. Her body resisted the information. In fact, she knew exactly where Pasha’s books were: slumped against each other on the top shelf in the corridor of their apartment. At any time, with any passing whim, she could’ve taken one down. Instead she’d been collecting excuses and justifications in order to support the theory that she was being willfully excluded from his readership. She had it all—the hurt feelings, the accusations—but there was no one to tell it to. Pasha certainly didn’t care whether his American niece had taken the time to read a single one of his collections. His blatant indifference made any theory of willful exclusion laughable. She could’ve read the poems but hadn’t. The willfulness was entirely on her end. Her surface apathy hid a deeper ambivalence, eschewal, restraint. Dig through those layers and reach a bedrock animosity. Frida felt only more confirmed in that stance. Why make an effort when there was no chance of its being reciprocated? But was she really looking for reciprocation from Pasha? No, she wanted it from her family. The rules that were writ in stone for her didn’t apply to Pasha—he didn’t reside within a block radius of the family headquarters, didn’t consult on every minor decision, didn’t put in the mandatory quality time, either of bonding or household labor, wasn’t a doctor, wasn’t even a Jew! And yet he got away with it. Not only that, he reigned supreme. They consulted him. He’d won. Was this fair? How could Frida not be resentful? Although the fact of the matter was that those rules from which he was not exempt must’ve once applied—he’d just had the resolve to struggle against them. I should read the poems, thought Frida.
Efim was still twirling the saltshaker.
This is only the beginning, he said sadly. It’s a steady degradation from here on in. Most of these guys won’t be sober again until they return home three weeks from now. Then they’ll start chronicling in extensive detail their experiences on LiveJournal, finding they all remember things a bit differently. They’ll launch internet battles, terrorize with comments, go on unfriending sprees.
You don’t sound like a poet, said Frida.
I’m a computer programmer, he said.
She refrained from asking the obvious question, soon answered when a bullfighting aficionado slapped Efim on the back and said, Hello, good man, I’m glad to see some things never change—your wife is still the life of the party.
I’m surprised Pasha’s not going to this Bulgarian carnival, Frida said to change the subject, as that comment had visibly diminished Efim’s spirits.
It’s Georgian, and what do you mean he’s not going?
We leave Monday, said tipsy Sveta, trying charmingly to pull together and not sound tipsy in the least. Did Pasha not tell you? He must’ve forgotten to mention it.
What about the wedding?
As it stands as of the present moment, we fly in the morning after the wedding, but not to worry, I’m about to fix that. It’s all my fault. Pasha’s lousy with dates. I should’ve known not to trust him with tickets.
But—said Frida.
No, said Sveta.
Then maybe while you’re away, I’ll stay at the dacha.
The dacha’s gone, said Pasha, evidently tuned in to the conversation. It’s gone. Finis. Poof. Please pass that along.
THIRTEEN
PASHA HADN’T BEEN INVITED to participate in the Odessa Conference of Literature. Not only did they not ask him to give a reading, instead scraping the bottom of the barrel for the few local poets not yet too far gone along the path of drunken incoherence or drunken vulgarity and incoherence or, the most terrible of all, of sober attempts at meaningful and/or innovative poetry, but they—the organizers, whom Pasha didn’t mention, perhaps deeming it too obvious, were those very bottom-of-the-barrel poets themselves—didn’t even invite him to take part in any of the marginal events, the festival fluff, which was how Pasha knew, though of course he would’ve known regardless, that he was being subjected to purposeful banishment. To put it simply: blacklisted.
From the acute pang and magnitude of hurt accompanying his exclusion, it would seem that this hadn’t happened last year. Because Pasha didn’t hold grudges, the wounds inflicted on him were always unforeseen. Scar tissue never formed. And he’d used the year to convince himself that it’d been a genuine blunder on some novice organizer’s part. Worse errors were known to occur in Ukraine. Someone could’ve easily forgotten to enter his name into the schedule just because he was too obvious a candidate for every single slot. The human brain had a funny way. A more probable explanation, he knew, was that they’d been teaching him a lesson. In that case the volumes of Google-able backlash from nonlocals should’ve taught a lesson in reverse.
At the conference he had spies. He didn’t have to ask—they volunteered their reports. His name circulated at public panels and during interviews, but most frequently in the gossip realm he so opposed. The volunteer spies had a great deal to disclose and did so with relish. Pasha was grateful. Motives weren’t questioned. He developed an addiction to their scoops, collecting evidence of victimhood. These purported friends were like drug dealers providing a steady supply of slanderous material. Pasha didn’t differentiate—a trivial scrap of spiteful blather from a notorious drunkard affected him no less than a six-thousand-word, vitriol-spewing, undigested work of so-called scholarship by a prominent critic in a widely read journal.
Pasha sulked around the house, not amused by Frida’s equally sulky accompaniment. She treated the moping of others as a challenge—could she mope to match? Several worries were on her mind: that it was already Saturday yet she was no closer to whatever miraculous intervention on the part of fate she’d been hoping for, that tomorrow she’d be faced with the decision of whether to accompany Pasha and Sveta to church or remain loyal to her condescending attitude toward all religious observance, that the day after tomorrow Pasha and Sveta were set to depart for their festival, and that Sanya hadn’t made the effort to see her on any of these days.
To escape the gloom, Pasha went to make the rounds of the corner marts, groceries, and shops on a fruitless search for a particular brand of Georgian mineral water, which he claimed was the only tonic for the gastric tumult that caused him to visit the bathroom as often as he checked his email for updates.
Can he possibly be this naïve? Frida asked once he’d gone, seizing the opportunity to reason with Sveta, who sat Indian style in her nightie on the living room floor, working on a watercolor. I mean, Frida clarified, he’s not an idiot. Doesn’t he realize they’ll keep doing this to him as long as he refuses to build defenses or change his ways? He makes it fun for them! Why won’t he just tell them to go fuck themselves? They’re nobodies! Instead he acts all wounded and helpless. How can he still be surprised by this bullshit? More important, how can he still bear to live in this city? If it’s so miserable, why won’t he budge?
Sveta spilled water onto the canvas. Frida gasped. Sveta’s hand had twitched, and she’d spilled too much. But after appraising, Sveta tipped the jar again, spilling even more. It’s not my job to analyze, she said. Dropping her paintbrush, she looked Frida in the eye. The wife of a poet, she explained, has three responsibilities: to feed him, to believe unconditionally in his genius, and to leave him alone. These posed no difficulty for her. Her ex-husband, Artem Muser (Hungarian parentage), an eminent philosopher and bassist fo
r the rock group Rote Goat, had also required the three, though with each passing year addenda had emerged. The second principle was key. As long as she’d believed in Artem, the rest was a pleasure. But somewhere along the way, she had lost her faith. Don’t get me wrong, she said, Artem is great at what he does—he’s a success by anybody’s standards. But a genius is a genius. Would his philosophical oeuvre be contemplated a century from then? Would the music of his band be moshed to? The unlikelihood of either never bothered him. He was cruising. He’d built a solid reputation and was reaping the rewards. Ranked among the leading philosophers in the country based on a sensationalistic doctoral dissertation, he was happy to sit on panels about Schopenhauer’s toilet and be told by the sleaziest department chair imaginable that out of all introductory courses his was the quickest to fill to capacity. And it was enough that his band played the annual Ukrainian heavy-metal fest. Occasionally they gathered a good crowd in Kiev.
Sveta, however, had expected more. She began to regard Artem as a regular man—gifted, endowed with a strong will, but nothing extraordinary. And feeding a regular man was little pleasure. In this new light, a few other trifles had come to her attention: Artem was a shameless philanderer, never asked a single question about her existence, and mentioned her “barren womb” regularly. These revelations had coincided, quite fortuitously, with the arrival of Pasha.
Your uncle is a genius the likes of which are distributed over time and across the earth with an exceedingly spare hand, said Sveta. I was sure of this from the very start. Sveta’s gaze went coy. Do you want to hear how we met?
Frida nodded, her foot going numb.
It was actually in New York, and I probably shouldn’t be telling you this, but it was a July evening in ’93. My husband had dragged me to Renata Ostraya’s party. I really didn’t want to go. They’d had a brief thing, but that wasn’t the issue. I’d lost my appetite after a weeklong flu, and for me Renata’s parties were strictly about gastronomic potential. Unable to partake, I was forced to interact. For an hour or two I nodded beside Artem but was drawn back to the table. Its proximity comforted. Instead of sampling dishes, I sampled conversations, overhearing fragments, rarely of interest. That’s how I spotted Pasha. A group of men were having one of those rambling discussions about everything at once. They were impressed with one another, this was clear. But they were standing by the table and popping pigs in a blanket into their mouths. I began to eavesdrop, my attention entirely given over to the gawky man with the unkempt beard—he wasn’t like the rest. He was different. I was just standing there when one of them, a chubby man with a pink face and no eyebrows—you saw him last night, Andrei Fishman—turned to me and said, Want to join in, or are we blocking the sausages? Stupefied, I’d said, Sausages. So what did Andrei do? He took a pig in a blanket from the pile and said, Open up. Can you imagine? I was mortified! He was dangling it in front of my nose, but my jaw was clamped shut. Nothing could’ve pried it open. That was when Pasha stepped in. He tilted back his head. He opened his mouth.
In telling the story, Sveta claimed she knew right then. Her fate had been disclosed. Weeks later she ran into Pasha in Brooklyn, and the coincidence didn’t surprise her, not least of all because she’d been hanging around Brighton bookstores for days on end in hopes of bumping into him. By the end of the year, she’d convinced Artem to apply for a professorship at Odessa State University, and the rest was history.
But the problem, for a long time, had been quite literally in the telling of the story—namely, that it was forbidden. Odessa was small, and Pasha’s renown had been steadily on the rise throughout their affair. (Artem lasted two years in Odessa—when he left, it was on his own.) It was as if the city were shrinking and Pasha expanding. When Odessa was unsure about anything, it turned to Pasha for his input. No matter that it was never to the liking of the public. His voice regularly flowed from the radio, and his stooped figure freely ambled into and out of the local TV stations. As long as he was with Nadia, Sveta couldn’t shout from the rooftops about their love. It was ironic—his wife had wanted to keep him a secret but couldn’t, and now Sveta had to keep him a secret but didn’t want to! She could tell only her best friend, Korina, and, post-divorce, her mother. Her best friend and her mother, two women Pasha was sure to find unbearable, were made to sit through countless iterations of the story.
He wasn’t about to leave Nadia, said Sveta. For all the drama in his life, Pasha will go to any lengths to avoid confrontation.
It took a long time for the inevitable to happen. At first Sveta had lived in dire fear of a run-in, then she’d desperately tried to psychically summon it, and by the time it actually occurred, she’d resigned herself to the fact that a cosmic force was against it, probably for the best. She’d been sitting with Korina at one of the wobbly metal tables outside Klara Bara, a café nestled in City Garden. The park was roughly the size of a city block yet had been laid out in such a manner that even natives lost their way there. This space-warp effect was useful to criminals, who fortunately had pieties and stuck if at all possible to the purses and wallets of out-of-towners.
Despite the heat, a cashmere shawl had been draped over her friend’s shoulders. Shawls were made to be fiddled with, but Korina took it to the extreme. She was rattling off her non sequiturs and taking calculated sips of her cappuccino, oohing and aahing. She calls herself a life connoisseur, said Sveta. It was a struggle. In those days I was still trying to mimic her sips. Suddenly Korina froze mid–shawl toss and said, Don’t turn, your poet’s here. Pasha walked by—no hello, nothing. He was trailed by Nadia and Sanya and a morose girl who was Sanya’s girlfriend. About ten minutes later, he emerged from the café with the most unfathomable expression on his face and introduced himself formally to Korina. What a pleasure, and I’ve heard so much about you (if Korina only knew . . . ). He made this altogether genuine effort to engage a woman among whose wisdoms was that a Virgo and a Cancer should never mix except for in the bedroom and who saw logic in wearing a crucifix, a kabbalah bracelet, and a bindi simultaneously. Sveta had kept up the friendship not least of all because she’d needed someone to listen, without growing weary or skeptical, to the legend of Pasha. But here was the famous poet, her illicit lover—in a stained, oversize polo with golf clubs on it, his left eyelid thick and oozing, clumps of dried food lodged in his gray beard.
So what did Pasha do? He squeezed my fingers under the table and went back to his family. As he walked off, I remember, Korina gripped her straw and said, That man is terribly libidinally charged.
So what did I say? I’m going to leave him!
And I did, said Sveta, experiencing a resurgence of pride. Your uncle, who isn’t the most proactive man, was forced into action—or rather into pathetic, hushed, late-night beseeching. He was a very disoriented gift giver (one week I got antique ivory incense canisters, a bag of cotton balls, anal beads, and a used toaster). None of that worked, so he tried anger and silence. Then, finally, after two months, he moved into my place.
What about Nadia?
What about her? said Sveta. She was put on suicide watch. But she’d never do it! I said this to Korina at the time, and I was right. At long last Nadia has reason to live—to make sure that Pasha gets no peace. Her goal is to take away the little that he has and torment him by any means, the more trite and disgraceful the better. Nadia has no qualms about being perceived as a hysterical, deranged old shrew. And do you know what Korina replied? She said, What else would you expect from a Scorpio?
Sveta laughed to herself. Too bad Korina’s no longer here, she said wistfully.
She died? said Frida.
God, no! An older man appeared, she was offered a position as a radio host, then the offer was rescinded, but not before she made the move to Lvov.
• • •
PASHA DIDN’T FEEL GOOD about leaving Frida alone and unentertained—though was he really a viable means of entertainment? Dreams of Georgia was the highlight of his year. Fifty-one weeks of i
solation were made tolerable by it. Socially ravenous on arrival, starved for acknowledgment, by festival’s end he was sated not only for the time being but for months. To refuel was imperative; a guilty conscience wouldn’t deter.
The morning of their departure to Tbilisi, Frida was awoken by a hushed phone conversation (loud conversations rarely woke anybody), Pasha’s voice leaking from the kitchen. Nu, nu, he said, followed by a pause. Aren’t you being rash about this? When Frida’s feet stirred—they were in the kitchen—he hastened the conversation to a close. If you say it must be so . . . But I beg you, give the matter some time, let it sit, and then see how you feel— Fine, I won’t, good-bye.
A fly came down the pockmarked runway of Pasha’s nose, resting a moment on the tip before resuming its frenzy of flight. Frida opened the fridge, contemplating the interior as if it were a composition made with artistic intention. She pretended to chew something and swallow. She wiped her palms on her shorts and looked out the window onto a dull courtyard that resembled the inside of the fridge.
The engagement is off, said Pasha.
Frida shook her head.
Sanya and his lady friend had an argument. They came to the conclusion that they shouldn’t be getting married.
Panic in a Suitcase: A Novel Page 22
