Panic in a Suitcase: A Novel

by Yelena Akhtiorskaya

  I thought she was pregnant, said Frida.

  Pasha shrugged. I don’t think she’s pregnant, he said.

  So it’s that simple?

  It’s as simple, or as complicated, as one chooses to make it.

  Really? thought Frida. How horrible. She opted to disregard that sentiment or put it aside for future analysis, suspecting that it had only the ring of truth. Does Sanya even know that I’m here?

  Her question seemed to pull Pasha from the depths of thought, interrupting an unrelated contemplation of something ineffable and solemn. But was it possible to always be pondering the very nature of existence, and if it was, didn’t it constitute some sort of disorder? In response to Frida’s question, he nodded sadly. Sanya knows. He wants to take you out on the town, show you the nightlife scene of Arcadia. That’s Sanya’s meadow of expertise, as the Americantsi say.

  Right now? she said, alarmed.

  Pasha was tickled. Now have some breakfast. Tomorrow night.

  Was Frida supposed to feel grateful at the offer? Was it meant to smooth over the fact that her entire excuse for being there had just been pulled out from under her? Assumed in the Arcadia offer was an utter lack of will on her part. Regrettably, the offer aroused a spike of positive feeling, which was by its very nature cowardly. It counteracted, it completely destroyed, the daring intensity of the rage that had just started to build. Sanya wanted to take her out to the nightclubs—well, she desperately wanted to go. Where else would she accidentally step on the foot of her future husband? That her forays into the nightlife scene of New York had been disastrous, mostly in a quiet way, pointing out a chronic inability to relax and have a good time, was irrelevant. By predisposing herself against Sanya, she’d only be harming herself. Why not try instead to empathize? Her cousin must’ve been devastated. He was embarrassed. Filled with grief and shame. He thought he’d found a life partner, not a simple pursuit in Odessa. The girls were gorgeous, sure, and liked a good time, but life-partner material they weren’t. Neither were they the least bit eager to settle for a man who didn’t own a yacht or a foreign passport, preferably both. If they did happen to settle, their bodies intuited the capitulation immediately—whatever crazy biological force had been keeping every part firm, distinct, and perky relented, letting all those parts slacken, merge, and collectively expand. Undoubtedly Sanya had been relieved to find a suitable bride and now experienced catastrophic disappointment. Aside from that, he knew that Frida had flown in for his wedding—to call it off so close to the date would’ve been mortifying for anybody. It became clear why almost a week had elapsed and Sanya had yet to make an effort to see her—he’d been undergoing great emotional upheaval.

  Did he give a time?

  He said he’d call an hour or so beforehand, to give you a chance to get ready.

  • • •

  IT WAS PAST NOON when Sveta staggered out of the bedroom in her clingy, sweated-through nightie, looking as if she’d just regained consciousness after a frying-pan whack to the skull, which probably wasn’t far afield from the effect of her pharmaceutical concoctions. Pasha had forgotten to make his silver-tray delivery, and it became evident that the treatment was hardly a luxury. Sveta knocked into the edge of the table in the corridor, sending the landline flying—batteries, plastic, not that she noticed. Pressing the heels of her hands into her wounded hip, she bent in half and yowled, then continued groping her way to the kitchen. Somewhere she found a kiwi. She ate it like a soft-boiled egg, peeling the top half and using a small rusty spoon to scoop out the flesh. By then the coffee was in a mug whose handle Pasha fitted over her hooked finger. She took it down in a single gulp. Sense returned to her gaze. Her hands jumped to her head, finding that her hair was still pinned back, ear exposed. Frida sat across the table pretending to leaf through something black and white with varying font sizes and interspersed images. Sveta was about to run out to preserve her dignity but then realized that the little dignity there was to preserve didn’t merit such effort. She sighed and tapped the mug’s rim, signaling for more coffee.

  But before it was poured, she was rushing out, screaming, Our flight, our flight! It was that afternoon, in just a few hours, and they weren’t packed, and Volk said he couldn’t drive them and there wasn’t a chance they’d make it. Not surprisingly, Sveta had a frantic style of departing. No one in the family was capable of even finding a partner who knew how to depart with grace.

  Pasha followed into the direction of the drawer banging, unzipping, torrential toppling. That he hadn’t packed the bags on his own or arranged for a ride to the airport or simply woken Sveta at an hour when she could do it herself without having a conniption—none of this was mentioned or seemingly even thought, except by Frida, who needed to remember that this was none of her business and she must stay out of it. But stay out of it where? Not sure what to do with herself, she found herself staring at the bookshelves in the corridor, about to pluck one of Pasha’s poetry collections from the stacks but picking up a statuette instead, placing in her palm a turtle with a globe-size tumor on its shell. Meanwhile, in the nearby bedroom, Pasha attempted to calm Sveta with the good news that now there was one less thing to worry about. A major hassle had been averted. Sveta’s curiosity was piqued (the toppling momentarily abated). Pasha explained that it was no longer necessary to change their return flight—because the wedding was off! Sveta admirably discarded the packaging in which the news was delivered. Chto, she said, and in her chto could be heard every nuance the news suddenly brought from black depths into plain sight. She had Frida in mind when that chto was uttered. But then their bedroom door closed, no more was heard.

  They emerged an hour later dressed as members of a pastoral polyamorous cult, lugging two suitcases and three lumpy duffel bags. The bedroom was the giant suitcase they’d decided to leave behind. It looked like the scene of a pogrom. Hesitating as to how formal to make this farewell, Sveta was about to say something genuine and heartfelt when three loud honks resounded. Disturbed more than most by noise, she ran to the door. Parked out front was her glamorous friend Ada—embarrassing on most occasions, heaven-sent in emergencies. She hopped out of the quivering convertible in order to assist with their bags, which she did with wondrous ease despite knee-length patent-leather boots on a six-inch heel, adapted for the season by the presence of air-vent strips along the calves. As Ada leaned in to plant a smooch on Pasha’s cheek, Frida swung shut the door—alone at last!

  The convertible’s vroom was still echoing when the lock turned. What’d you forget? yelled Frida. In marched Sveta’s half brother, Volk, followed by a wobbling wife of the miniature hormonal variety, and their kids. Frida’s face muscles betrayed her.

  They didn’t tell you? said Volk.

  There’s no communication in this household, said Frida.

  We’re here for the week.

  The family had left their home in the suburbs to come to the city and sleep in Pasha and Sveta’s windowless bedroom—this was their idea of a vacation. The room it took Sveta an hour to destroy took the wife three to return to order, a ratio that likely had broad applicability. The children moved in a multisonorous cloud of elbows. Primarily at home in the courtyard, they occasionally swooped indoors. The wife retrieved a frozen hunk of meat and began slamming it against the counter’s edge. The fact had to be acknowledged, circumstances were deteriorating fast.

  FOURTEEN

  VOLK’S WIFE CAME equipped with a nose and used it to sniff at fishy situations such as this. They’d planned their city vacation months ago, after learning that Pasha and Sveta would be going to Georgia for some writers’ congress or other. Sveta had boasted of her travel plans to her brother, and later that evening over a steamy mound of buckwheat Volk had good-humoredly poked fun at his sister’s jet-setting lifestyle to his always-thinking wife, who’d said, Volky, you know what this means, don’t you? Volky rarely did. A city vacation, of course! The wife masterminded, Volky arranged. An empty house had been promised. Instead th
ey got Pasha’s American niece, Frida, who sat unmoving in the living room. The wife suspected that the girl had been planted there to make sure they didn’t do God knows what with the apartment and to report them if they did, in which case they could be sure to never have another city vacation again.

  The wife journeyed from the kitchen to the bathroom, as this was an opportunity to pass by Frida’s station. Having taken a good look, she went to deliberate over the toilet seat. Her impression was that Frida didn’t look like a spy. But back in the kitchen, the suspicions returned. She took a vase of wilted carnations from the corridor and brought it, along with a cloud of fruit flies, to the living room, setting it atop an already overloaded coffee table. Frida’s gaze bounced from the wife to the vase to the wife. Thank you, Frida muttered. The wife noticed a photo album in Frida’s hands and left satisfied. But something still didn’t sit right.

  Over the course of the morning, Frida received stale flowers, fresh towels, and plenty of unnerving stares. There was minimal verbal accompaniment. A malfunction seemed to occur when the wife ran into the room, looked square at Frida, and ran out. A minute later, more composed, she peeked in to see whether Frida had worked up an appetite—odd phrasing, as Frida had hardly moved all day. Frida shook her head in what was presumably a universal gesture. A plate of plov appeared on her lap. The wife was on her way out but plopped down on the sofa instead.

  The remote control was nearby, but the wife’s arms were short; they couldn’t quite make it. Frida was determined not to help. The wife was determined to prove her helplessness, groaning and grunting as she fruitlessly reached. Frida refused to be drawn into this ridiculous drama, the wife refused to get up or even scooch forward to get the damn piece of plastic off the coffee table. After much ineffectual strain, she emitted a sigh of defeat and fell back onto the cushion. Resigned to life without television. This was horrible. Little was as depressing as the wife sitting on the sofa deprived of entertainment. Unfortunately she couldn’t also turn off her need to see. Her gaze began to scale the walls, crammed with icons of the Virgin. If she were to become entranced by the icons, Frida was in danger as well. Remote snatched and thrown at the wife, who accepted the device with only a touch of exasperation that it hadn’t arrived sooner.

  Two women sat across from each other in an intimate kitchen setting, their flabby elbows propped on a crocheted tablecloth on which stood, ideally spaced, a gorgeous blue porcelain tea set, cups too tiny to hold any reasonable amount of liquid, fulfilling the nobler function of evoking distant epochs when objects still had value. These were hefty broads, keen to gossip. With chins drawn into their chests, they peered out deviously from under hooded eyelids while tossing around names that in a country of roughly fifty million meant nothing only to Frida. Once a name was thrown into the air, the unfortunate person to whom it belonged became an invisible patient lying on the table amid the fine china and a dissection began, lasting as long as it took to get to the source of all rottenness. The finer specimens really made you dig. There didn’t seem to be more to the show’s premise. Commercials were few but potent. Frida tried to avoid looking up, as the TV was now the wife’s domain and Frida intended to not get tangled up in the wife’s business. The screen, clearly, was a trap. So she stared at the massive photo album in her lap, selecting a page at random. It was toward the beginning—the obscure part of every good photo album, where the relationships on display were at their most abstract. Pasha took this obscurity to the extreme. Most people’s albums began with their grandparents and ended with themselves in the present or the recent past or their children. Pasha’s album ended with grandparents and began with inconceivable likenesses. Here was a photograph of a man, yet the photograph didn’t look like a photograph and the man didn’t look like a man. It looked as if someone had used a soft graphite pencil to sketch the shadow of a ghost caught in a dusty mirror, then tried to erase it with one of those hardened pink erasers on the pencil’s other end, and buried the sketch in a courtyard’s piss-soaked soil until it was dug up by Pasha, who didn’t bother to clean it off before sticking it into the album. The man was ultra-dead, all the people who’d ever seen the back of his head or heard him hum were dead, and this lack of ties to the wet cement of time was felt deeply when looking at his face. Or trying to look and failing, since a composite image never formed, there was no man to be seen.

  That’s a pretty top, said the wife.

  Frida looked up when spoken to, a bad habit. The wife noted Frida’s confusion and pinched her collar to show what she meant. Your top, she said, is pretty.

  Frida looked down at her long-sleeved gray T-shirt, the one she’d been sleeping in, which contained visible traces of many of her previous snacks and was sprinkled with crumbs from her latest one, and the heat rushed to her face.

  Is that a typical American top? asked the wife. Once again registering Frida’s confusion, she elaborated, Are those the kinds of tops that the young women wear in the States?

  Yeah, said Frida. Then shook her head, No. They wear lots of different kinds, she said, an infinite variety. No such thing as a typical top. That’s why America’s known as a free country. She wasn’t sure why she was taking this tone or whether she was being sarcastic.

  And you have Baby Einstein, said the wife.

  Yep, said Frida, hoping to leave it at that and not stir the insanity brewing underneath.

  Here they’d never think up anything like that, said the wife. And it shows, you know, upon the quality of our youth. Savages! Little liars, hooligans, and thieves! Whenever Volky or I hear that somebody’s visiting from abroad, we don’t ask for denim jackets or air conditioners or even fancy phones, we ask only for Baby Einstein. The wife paused and gave a stare of significance. When we heard you were coming, she resumed, we asked Pavel Robertovich to ask you to bring the Baby Einstein for us. They’re always coming up with something new, you know.

  Frida’s eyes lifted in contemplation, as if she might suddenly remember about all the Baby Einstein products she’d hauled in from the States. The wife read Frida’s thoughts and narrowed her focus on the bloated suitcase in the center of the room (still packed, of course, just herniating a few garments). The moment of hope was allowed to take a breath.

  I would’ve, but Pasha never mentioned anything.

  The wife’s attention remained fixed on the suitcase. He never mentioned it? she repeated, absorbing her disappointment gradually, in doses.

  Not a word, said Frida.

  Well, Pavel Robertovich is a busy man. He has many important things to think about. And who are we to him?

  Pasha’s a little absentminded, said Frida. There seems to be a consensus about that. If you want him to do something, you need to provide constant poking.

  We reminded the both of them not once and not twice. Volky and I keep to ourselves, we don’t impose. But when it comes to Baby Einstein, we’re not shy. They really never said anything about it to you?

  Frida shook her head, noting the regression, a bad sign. Of course, if I’d known, she said, I would’ve brought it for you. And next time—

  So you don’t have it? said the wife.

  No, said Frida.

  The wife wasn’t devastated, another bad sign. She wasn’t devastated not because she was a rational adult who could handle such news but because it still didn’t register, or perhaps she didn’t believe it.

  The door flew open, and a boy ran in, inflamed knees like grapefruits being lurched through the air, hands cupped tensely over something. He screeched—the sound came from his joints. Other boys followed, dashing after the first, screeching at their own particular frequencies, little Einsteins in training. The last one, chubby and asthmatic, probably with a rash somewhere, caught Frida’s foot and went flying, stumpy arms akimbo, past the sofa, slamming the entirety of his weight into one of the grandfather clocks. The compound wail of the boy and the clock set something off in Frida. She was gone.

  • • •

  AFTER SHE’D LEFT
the courtyard behind, there was a lapse of several blocks. She hurried blindly, inserting distance between herself and the apartment, the icons and clocks, Volky and his wife on their precious city vacation as they kept referring to it, with no intention to seize the day and take advantage of the actual city. Was Frida one to talk? She had yet to stray from the half-mile radius of Pasha’s initial tour. She kept to the same side of the street, used the same crosswalks, passed between the same two paint-chipped colonnades, all the while noticing helplessly the rigidity with which she navigated.

  The people on the benches in Sobornaya Square were ancient. It was hard to imagine them ever going home, and it didn’t help that the city had a fondness for the sitting statue. Leonid Utesov was sunning himself beside an old lady not at all averse to a distinguished bronze arm around her papery shoulders.

  Crossing Preobrazhenskaya at the frenzied intersection where public minibuses convened in a chaotic grid-central huddle, Frida was blasted by their ferocious heat. She continued, coughing, along the gated perimeter of City Garden. Go inside, an inner voice instructed. Enjoy your life—explore! But the tangle of shrubbery was too thick, the trees screened out too much daylight. Hadn’t she been warned about this park? Under no circumstances go in the vicinity of City Garden! It’s the scene of gruesome murders and frequent robberies, and let’s not get started on the rapes. Or had that warning been tacked onto Park Shevchenko? One of them was a beautiful park, ideal for a stroll on a warm summer day such as this, and the other was where practically every Ukrainian female had been robbed at gunpoint, molested, viciously raped.

  Sabaneev Bridge was also called Mother-in-Law Bridge. Prince Vorontsov had it erected after building his mother-in-law a house across a now-nonexistent river from his palace, a bridge that in the past few decades had acquired the tradition of newlywed lock-hanging. Sveta’s chirp, Pasha’s rabbinic profile. Were they having fun in Tbilisi? Were they at least a little bit worried, racked by guilt, having left Frida to fend for herself in a foreign city?