Panic in a Suitcase: A Novel

by Yelena Akhtiorskaya

  Some kind of childish force overtook her, dragging her to the bottom of the sea, turning her upside down into handstands and underwater somersaults, as if she were stuck in a washer-dryer, tumbling forward. The machine had been fed only so many quarters, and at some point the propelling force abated. Frida continued splashing around for a few minutes before the atmospheric change was noted—it had grown darker and more silent. She had just popped up from yet another exploration of the oddly fishless depths and thought the seawater had plugged her ears. She stuck in a pruned fingertip and shook. Nothing dribbled out. It was an eventful quiet, like the hushed voices and mincing footsteps that had nightly navigated the corridor outside her childhood bedroom door. And the darkness—could it be dusk already? Could it be rolling on so unevenly and suddenly, in such odd clumps? Frida was facing the horizon, and instinct turned her head to the right in search of the pier and the setting sun, but there was only a thicker pile of altered atmosphere, dense murk. This wasn’t Brighton, however. When in a certain mood, Marina liked to proclaim that Odessa was inferior to Brooklyn only in that it had a north-south as opposed to an east-west beach, meaning that if you intended to tan properly—and why wouldn’t you?—by day’s end you’d be facing not the glorious sea but the trash cans, café drunkards, smog off the city’s skyline. Aha! But having turned around, Frida still failed to locate the sun, instead finding that the beach, just a moment ago populated by the malnourished and seedy, the youthful and sluggish, the elderly and exhaustingly vital, was almost entirely cleared. Food wrappers and trampled sand. A chaise longue tipped on its side. The remaining few were bent over, stuffing haphazard handfuls into giant straw bags before scampering off. The backs of their knees were heartbreaking. Frida thought she saw a bowlegged man squat down and in a single jerk snatch her stuff, which she’d left in a deflated heap begging to be snatched. Wait, she yelled, young man, wait! But why should the man, who wasn’t at all young, do that? The bowlegs were perfect for getting over a jetty. Her muscles turned leaden. The sky, too, seemed to have turned to lead. This low, oppressive ceiling was bound to collapse. Almost with relief she realized how dire the situation was, how inexorably dire. There was no one around. Odd objects were being hurled by gusts, rebounding off metal clouds. Birds—tiny seagulls—were flying low and fast. All was lost. She heard a rumble, felt a drop.

  It lasted several minutes and was more of a drizzle. Then the clouds parted and some rays dropped down, weak ones, as it was getting late.

  People spilled out of cafés, emerged from behind corners, out of potholes and ditches, returning in throngs. You’d think they were made of sugar, thought Frida, to be so afraid of a little rain. A chill in the air was taken advantage of by young men, who eagerly wrapped themselves around any pair of bare shoulders in the vicinity. Shivers convulsed Frida’s own shoulders, on which every hair stood at attention, yet she didn’t pick up her pace as she waded out of the water, taking steps with deliberate slowness, afraid of what she’d find on shore.

  She had no money (stolen) but she did have pants (discarded), which was more than could be said for most of the girls boarding the tram. Young women in this city evidently commuted free of charge. Though the term commute implies obligation, routine, dreariness, whereas these women were composed of light particles that simply floated (or took the tram) from one location to another, likely never to revisit the same place twice, not least of all because these women had the memory spans of cats and approximately eight minutes after arriving at their destination would have forgotten all about a point of origin. Frida’s free ride wasn’t the same as theirs—they got by on their shapely, tanned legs, she got by on pity. Though the truth of the matter was that the tram conductor had long ceased admiring legs or feeling pity, now interested only in finishing up his shift and getting back to his homing pigeons.

  • • •

  THE WIFE STOPPED GOING about her business (a crossword puzzle) in order to relay a message. She wanted to exude contentment but was sweating buckets. The city was taking its toll, and she hadn’t even gone outside yet.

  A message for me? said Frida in alarm, seeing before her eyes, in rapid succession, a mushroom cloud, the scene from Terminator 2 when the children in the playground disintegrate, a tidal wave with claws in the style of Hokusai, a many-car pileup, and a collapsing skyscraper. She took a few steps into the kitchen to sit down, overcome, suddenly, by exhaustion.

  The wife’s attention was drawn to the floor. Stop right there! she screamed. Look at the grime you’re hauling in here! Where are your shoes?

  By the time Frida had managed to mouth, I lost them, her feet were planted in a plastic tub of warm water while a pungent mop made concentric circles around her.

  Yes, said the wife, a message, from Aleksandr Pavlovich.

  Sanya came by?

  He called. Asked to speak with his father. There’s a forgetful gene in your family if you ask me. Then he said that he also wanted to talk to you.

  He could’ve called my cell—Pasha gave him the number.

  He said he tried. A man answered and shouted at him.

  That can’t be, said Frida. The wallpaper’s domino pattern began to blur and the wife’s face to rearrange like a game of Tetris. Frida was suddenly aware of the universe, in all its strangeness and inescapability. You run one way and it’s the universe, the other way and universe. The wife was supporting her elbow when she came to, having realized that after putting on her pants post-swim, she’d no longer felt the cell phone’s hardness in her back pocket. Of course this didn’t rule out the possibility that she was being followed.

  The wife, who proved to have very large teeth and hazel eyes with velvety lashes, didn’t require an explanation for Frida’s little spell, preferring, in fact, not to have one. Frida was now standing upright and no longer draining of color rapidly, which the wife took to signal the episode’s end.

  He probably wanted to say that he’s going to pick me up, said Frida. Did he give a time? I have to get dressed! What do I wear? I’ll be late. Should I meet him somewhere, or is he on his way here?

  None of this, said the wife. The wedding’s back on. That’s what he called to say. Now, if you ask me, all this back-and-forth, it doesn’t bode well.

  Sanya had reconciled with Nadia—yes, just like the mother, a particularly common coincidence nobody was adequately disturbed by. This joyous news came, however, with a downside: Sanya wouldn’t get a chance to see Frida prior to Sunday’s event. The couple had decided that there was too much noise around them and that in order to start their marriage on the right footing they needed quality time alone before the nuptials, something that just wasn’t possible in Odessa, which might seem like a big city to a foreigner like Frida but was actually a village where going out for eggs meant that in exactly three and a quarter hours Olga Nudnaya, who had Gypsy blood and lived on the opposite side of town, would call to ask what the matter was, as there were bags under your eyes and you were wearing the same shirt from yesterday. Besides, Sanya was something of a celebrity, not just as his father’s son but on his own merit as filmmaker and bon vivant. The news of the wedding’s reinstatement was sure to spread like wildfire. They were off to Yalta for a few days to bask in the Crimean sun and get a dose of the savage Tatar spirit, and lamb. Frida would have to take a rain check on Arkadya, which he’d make good on if she was still around when they got back from their real honeymoon, a month of island-hopping in Greece.

  • • •

  FRIDA CALLED HOME. Her mother picked up and failed to sound sufficiently enthusiastic.

  I’m very enthusiastic, said Marina, it’s just four A.M. on Tuesday.

  Aren’t you worried about me? Don’t you care how I’m doing?

  I was trying to give you your space—

  Well, if you care to know, I’ve been robbed! Frida’s face grew piping hot, and her mouth twisted open. There was a brief pause as the pressure built inside her head, climbing steadily until with a rubbery croak all that air was
released, alongside a deluge of mucus and tears.

  Change your ticket and come home this minute, said her mother.

  Frida whimpered for a little longer, then stopped abruptly. Please don’t give me orders, she said.

  What did they take? Are you hurt?

  Only my cell phone and some of the stranger’s money.

  What stranger? Fridachka, come home. Take the knife out of my liver.

  Frida took an exasperated breath. I’m fine, Ma. In fact, I’ve never been better. I only called to say hello. But now I need to be getting back.

  Wait—tell me more. Have you been to the dacha? How are the raspberry—

  I can’t talk! I have to get back!

  Get back to what?

  To sitting in Pasha’s bathtub fully dressed. She stretched out her legs and lay back, finding herself under a zigzag canopy of Sveta’s tiny, lacy delicates, which had been squeezed aggressively and hung to dry. Pasha was, after all, a sensualist. Packaging made a difference to him. You could tell by one glance at Sveta’s shoe rack. There wasn’t a single sensible pair—but there was nothing sensible about these people. What so infuriated Frida about this place was that the rules of proper living were neither enforced nor acknowledged. And yet the feeling she’d had at the dacha, that this trip would serve to realign the facets of her life at home, stimulate the machine into motion, was gone. How convenient if that’d been the case—she’d go on battling anatomy textbooks, look back with fond bewilderment on her visit to Odessa, and that would be that. Trying to become convinced of the rightness of this outcome was useless. She already knew what had to be done.

  She had to miss that flight. By the time the thought was articulated, it was too far along to be dismissed. There’s a delay, thought Frida, between the lurking forces that brew into events and the events as they unfold for our viewing pleasure, like the universe equivalent of the delay between the windup effort and the automatic chatter of a pair of mechanized plastic teeth. She’d often been accused of not having appropriate reactions, of being zatormozhenaya, existentially blocked, an important word lacking a proper English match; perhaps it was because by the time events actually occurred, they already felt old, as obvious and inevitable as memories, and to react to them adequately required some showmanship. Those resistant to acting, if not biologically incapable of it, were deemed zatormozheniye. But the fact of the matter was that if enough attention was paid to those lurking forces, very few events couldn’t be seen coming from miles away. Therein lay the danger of the delay. It cast a shadow that could be interpreted as fate—but there was no such thing. She wasn’t fated to forget about medical school, to stay in Odessa; to stay was her choice, and most probably a stupid one. If it felt inevitable, it just felt so, the illusion of destiny. When the decision to throw her future down the toilet didn’t pan out, she wouldn’t allow herself solace in the thought that at least it was meant to be so, and therefore she couldn’t plunge headfirst and then pray, relying, as the Brighton Beach real estate developers did, on the higher powers to take care of the rest. She knew all too well what the end result of such heedless faith looked like—crumbling stucco, torn plastic, exposed innards, weathered rot, and eventual collapse. If she was to go through with this, really go through with it, she needed resolve, tenacity, and, more pointedly, a purpose.

  Tired of studying the frilly hems and see-through patches of Sveta’s underwear, she looked down and found herself clutching Pasha’s book—she must’ve grabbed it off the shelf on the way to the bathroom by reflex. She brought its spine to her nose. It smelled of dust and purpose. This insensible man was it. Who better to write Pasha’s biography? Someone would have to do it, and considering Pasha’s wealth of enemies, his radical—at least by the day’s standard—sense of privacy, his intolerance of gossip and insistence on historical accuracy and precision, it was in his interest that his niece be the one. She’d need to buy a tape recorder, a marbled notebook, a pen. She’d interview mercilessly. It would be eight hundred pages, a scholarly tome examining Pasha’s life, analyzing every one of his works and wives.

  But she didn’t know the first thing about biographies. Where did one begin, especially with a story so tangled from the very start? The great Russian poet Pavel Robertovich Nasmertov, who wasn’t really Russian considering that he’d never lived in Russia proper but in Ukraine, only don’t dare call him Ukrainian, and furthermore was Jewish, which in Russia qualified as a separate nationality if not species, though he wasn’t really Jewish, having converted to Orthodoxy, was born on November 20-something in the year 1950-something in Odessa, a city where he’d lived his entire life, although hadn’t he actually been born elsewhere, and neither could this still be considered the same Odessa, as what remained of the city was a shell of its former self, full of recent transplants and ruthless hostility to the Poet who’d remained? (It would probably be necessary at this juncture to mention that practically the entire Jewish population had relocated to Brighton’s stinky hub, without making it too obvious that she believed that old Odessa’s greatness lay solely in its Jews.) Frida had never been diligent or thorough. Facts were nothing but a nuisance. She’d have to defer to her uncle on many complex matters. Would her temperament allow her to take dictation? And would she be able to swallow her personal feelings and opinions in order to pen an objective account? But she was getting ahead of herself—in order to put aside personal feelings and opinions, she’d first have to figure out what they were. The effort struck her as nothing short of impossible.

  A not-terrible place to get started, however, was the poems. The poems! Here they were, sitting quiet in a worn jacket. Just as she cracked the cover and began to make fumbling attempts to decipher the Cyrillic, she was reminded by a wild banging that she’d been camping out for over an hour in a very prime location, to the great frustration of the rest of the household. Volk, it’s true, had been created to survive in the desert and went for days without an ounce of water coming or going, and the children could relieve themselves in the courtyard, but the wife had given birth to those children and wished that one day Frida would discover what that did to a bladder.

  FIFTEEN

  IN THE LAND OF GEORGIA, the poets were sporting fresh tans and new necklaces as they arrived from a day trip to the seaside town of Poti and were distributed among the forty-nine floors of Hotel Skyscratcher, which compensated for its location on the frayed hem of the outskirts of Tbilisi with an Olympic-size swimming pool and three Ping-Pong tables, though only the negligible poets from Bulgaria were intent on making use of them. That evening a banquet was held in their honor in the airy palm-tree-lined lobby, and it somehow never ended, perhaps because the poets kept eating and drinking until it was time for the staff to set up for breakfast. The banquet turned into a permanent fixture, as the hotel manager, a short young man with mischievous eyes, seemed to understand that poets couldn’t be expected to abide by regular mealtimes, getting hungry at all hours of the day and night. Some smoked fish, suluguni, dwarf cucumbers—nothing spectacular, but better than nothing. There was a late-morning scuffle, however, in the course of which the electric samovar was knocked over and scalding water flew everywhere, burning the scrawny bald poet who’d been shoved into the impressive machine. The nearest hospital was hours away and technically in a different district, so he was taken to the hotel manager’s brother-in-law’s father’s house, whose basement served as a private clinic. Nobody knew the poet’s name, but everybody agreed that he had it coming. Since the festival’s opening, he’d been laughing deliberately at inappropriate moments and chewing loudly throughout the readings and performances, asking baffling questions during the question-and-answer portions, and behaving very coarsely with the poetesses and poets’ wives, who didn’t seem to mind. The elderly woman who accompanied him everywhere, assumed to be his mother, disappeared with him. After the incident the hotel threatened to remove the banquet, since perhaps it was a bad idea to have so many hot-blooded poets congregating in the lobby at al
l hours, eating spicy foods and washing them down with spiked tea. But the poets didn’t want to be so inconvenienced as to have to find another venue to fit the whole lot of them, especially considering that for miles around there was nothing but barren, scorched earth. They promised to be on their best behavior and leave large tips. They’d developed a deep fondness for the lobby. Every corner of it had been claimed. It was divided into thirty-two sections, which was the number of countries represented that year in the festival. Of course, none of them stayed in their own nation’s section, or even visited, but they knew it was there in case a return became necessary.

  About eight hours after the first incident, there was another, a skirmish among the Romanians, who were surprisingly active this year and producing stellar work (that made you want to slit your wrists). This time the injured included an elderly Georgian waiter who happened to be the disabled uncle of the hotel manager. Everybody kept saying disabled uncle until the two words merged, but nobody mentioned disabled how. The banquet was cleared. The problem was that there were so many of them. The number of attendees had more than doubled from the previous year. No longer was it exclusively poets—dramaturges, translators, editors, publishers, and journalists were now welcome to take part, and had anybody ever heard of a translator turning down an invitation? In the months leading up to the festival, an additional effort had been made to attract young poets, because apparently it was very important that the younger generation of writers feel connected to a long-standing tradition and not just, as one coordinator put it, stew in their own juices, but the suspicion was that the festival organizers wanted nice photos of good-looking people to display on the festival’s website. Writers in general weren’t the most attractive bunch, but in the previous years the average age of the participants had been sixty, and not the new sixty; both on the stage and off and everywhere you looked, it was just old-fogy poets who either never showered or had sweat-gland issues and smiled black, toothless smiles, and even they were moved to a quick bath or a shave or an appointment with the dentist after clicking through those pics.