Panic in a Suitcase: A Novel

by Yelena Akhtiorskaya

  A few poets took the organizational effort upon themselves, trying to ensure that a new venue be found and agreed upon by all, a place that would preserve the collective unity but still have a casual atmosphere and enough space for people to wander around and not feel the pressure to interact constantly, and which would have those dwarf cucumbers cut into halves and peeled. Basically, they wanted to find another lobby banquet. For some reason they started collecting signatures. They were very much against what seemed to already be naturally occurring—namely, that after the scheduled events of the day ended, different groups went off into different directions, because in the previous years when there had not been so many of them, they had done everything together, and they believed that the entire point of such a festival was to make new friends and contacts, not just stick with those you already knew. They were sad, lonely people, engaged in a noble, if impossible, pursuit.

  Pasha and Sveta were, of course, relieved only now that they and their group, mainly poets from New York and a few from Moscow, could use their three remaining evenings in this locale to wander off in their own direction (or call a car service and pay a surprisingly reasonable fee to get to downtown Tbilisi—if they’d known it would be so reasonable, they might’ve tried it sooner). Wherever they went, others somehow sniffed it out and followed, feigning coincidence. They were the cool group insofar as there was still such a concept, and naturally there was, which didn’t matter much but was amusing to realize. Really, everything was going wonderfully. The weather was superb. There had been a misty rain in the beginning, just when they had gotten there, but it quickly dissipated and the sun came out and hadn’t left their side since. In the outdoor market in Poti, Pasha had bought a traditional Georgian vest and was wearing it daily. He felt he had reached the apex of maturity and could do something silly like wear a Georgian vest over his mature belly, a vest with colorful silk patches, exaggerated lapels, and tassels destined to be dipped in Tkemali sauce. In Pasha’s case maturing proved to be the opposite of what may be expected—it was the progression from seriousness to silliness, from rigidity to looseness. Nevertheless he would undoubtedly experience a pinch of regret when looking through the festival photos. Without realizing it he was wandering into everybody’s background, and that ridiculous vest made him extremely discernible, regardless of the degree of blur. The photos would be posted widely on the internet, both on the official festival website and on individual blogs, announcing Pasha as a fat man with a smug smirk in a pompous vest and thereby alienating even those he hadn’t managed to alienate personally. And if that didn’t do the trick, there was the unfortunate quote he gave the not-unattractive journalist covering the festival for Znamya. A slender blonde with thin lips and darting athletic eyes, she cornered Pasha to ask him a few questions. When he began to speak, she turned on the tape recorder. Nurzhan Bozhko overheard the answers Pasha gave and was stunned.

  But I called the festival a stupendous success, said Pasha.

  Yeah, said Nurzhan, and then proceeded to rant about the great majority of these so-called poets.

  I don’t rant, said Pasha.

  That’s true. You enlighten.

  Bozhko, usually so miserly, bought Pasha a drink (Don’t protest, you need it), because it was truly impressive his talent for shooting himself in the foot—under no circumstances did Pasha fail. Pasha laughed, and downed his drink, and felt like a hero, until they got back to the hotel and Sveta began doing something with her long fingers and an oppressive cloud settled over Pasha, like a fat lady plopping down in his lap, an obese lady with a vulgar smell and bubbling laughter that rolled over him in thick waves and made the room go black. He was asleep.

  The next morning Pasha ate a bigger breakfast than usual, sucked a few extra sugar cubes with his tea, and took the luxury bus alone (the others, Sveta included, were determined to sleep in) to the campgrounds to catch the panel on trends of new sincerity in bourgeois cosmopolitan poetry, which from the very start suffered from low blood pressure and quickly devolved into mutterings, non sequiturs, and short-lived eruptions of disoriented tittering. And gossip. It was the beginning of a long day. Even the sun shone in a timid, noncommittal way, sensing that it would have to be putting in a sustained effort. Pasha stood outside the tent where a roundtable debate about theories of translation was in progress, and though he had a few things to say on the subject, he wandered off instead. Fifteen years ago his shoulders had been like balance scales with a small grapefruit on the left scale and a large blood orange on the right; now on the right scale was truth and on the left murder in cold blood. Every step Pasha took looked like an attempt to settle this imbalance once and for all, but every step only further deepened it. He walked. He realized that his face muscles ached from squinting so hard, yet he could hardly see a thing, and at the same moment he was gripped, very distinctly, by the wish to run into Brodsky, to just nonchalantly run into him and get to talking. No greeting or introduction, just business. This was late Brodsky, who never got to be old man Brodsky. Late Brodsky was the equivalent of present Pasha. An odd, moist paleness under Brodsky’s eyes (that made his freckles look like bloated capsules of moldy water) would be the only sign he might not be feeling well. Otherwise, from his speech and manner, he might as well have been a man in his prime. They’d sit down in the shade somewhere, probably at a café where Brodsky could order a double espresso, though of course he shouldn’t have been drinking a double espresso, and within seconds Pasha would be engulfed in the smoke from Brodsky’s cigarette. The desire was so strong that Pasha even glanced up and searched for him in the crowds, which were growing, friends reuniting after their rest, after their nightmares. Pasha felt like a candidate for a heart attack. He went to get water and drank it down greedily, as if his thirst had been building for decades. As he drank, he was showing others, those standing around taking delicate sips from their tall glasses, just how superficial their thirst was. It had to be saved up, amassed. They shouldn’t have been drinking at all.

  But after sitting down at a secluded table in the shade, getting comfortable, what exactly would Brodsky have said? At first he would’ve made some jokes, been a tad too jovial, protecting himself, but what about after that energy was out of the way? Did Pasha just want Brodsky to repeat the wise, funny things he’d already heard Brodsky say in brief impromptu clips and live interviews from festivals such as this, or did he want Brodsky to impart his slight lisp to the more substantial written interviews, articles, and profiles that Pasha had already read, as he’d read them all, with the only difference being that they be personally addressed to him? Did he want others, passing poets, to see in whose company he truly was? Or was it enough to watch the soft contour of Brodsky’s chin (he had no jaw, only chin) while seeing himself reflected in Brodsky’s round, wire-rimmed spectacles? Of course not. It was Pasha who had something to tell Brodsky. Something urgent. He needed to unburden. No—he needed to plead his case.

  Was there a way to do that in one broad stroke? And where to begin? If for comprehensive purposes (and they were nothing if not comprehensive men) it was necessary to begin at the beginning, they’d be there for days or more likely weeks; he’d bore Brodsky to a second death. Pasha felt discouraged. He found a seat on a metal bleacher. A skinny woman with tense shoulders took a measured bite of her sandwich, the tinfoil like a cracked alien eggshell on her lap. He blocked the sun with his hand. In the distance the whitish shuttle bus was riding off and Sveta was entering the campgrounds. Not far behind, Bozhko was slinking along.

  The fact of the matter, for one thing, was that the other night Pasha hadn’t intended to shoot himself in the foot. No offense had been meant. He’d simply been stating the obvious. They were happy to be hosted by Georgia, to be treated like VIPs, and they were all enjoying themselves immensely—though perhaps he should speak for himself. He was happy, he was enjoying. And from the exponentially growing numbers of participants, it was clear that the festival mission was a stupendous success, as he’d sa
id. Russian-language poets from across the globe were meeting and getting acquainted with one another’s work, forging friendships and international partnerships, and so on. But did anybody really think it was possible that some hundred-plus Russian-language poets existed at any one time? A poet was born, not bred. The entire twentieth century had about a dozen (you among them, needless to say). And let’s be honest: Since when did poetry benefit from a breakfast-is-included mentality? A luxury bus picked up the poets outside the hotel lobby at eight, and there was a shuttle every half hour afterward for those who didn’t make it, transporting them with bathroom access to the campgrounds, where refreshments were served throughout the day. The poets had needed to know: Was the shuttle free of charge? Almost free, the Tbilisi representative had said, not quite. Be precise! There was a very minuscule fare, to be determined by each individual shuttle driver. This did not strike the poets as right. And eight A.M. was, by consensus, too early for the bus—how about nine-thirty? But events began at nine, and it was a half-hour drive on clear roads, which weren’t at all guaranteed. Pity the poet whose reading was scheduled for nine! Though perhaps, if things really got rolling, many would be awake not already but still.

  The bus schedule wasn’t an issue for Pasha, who couldn’t remember the last time he’d been able to sleep past dawn. The complimentary breakfast was a nuisance—he helplessly found himself filling a large plate, a small plate, and a bowl and then methodically emptying them into himself, adding layers of food onto the undigested layers from the previous night. But the campgrounds, littered with makeshift stages, sunburned faces, crammed tents, appealed to Pasha in that they resembled a flea market—everything drab, plentiful, on display yet camouflaged, visible and utterly overlookable. Pasha had patience, the key with both flea markets and poetry festivals (and baseball games, so he’d heard). Oftentimes the most awaited readings proved the dullest and the most captivating had an audience that could be counted on one hand, or so it was nice to think. But who was Pasha kidding? And if Brodsky wasn’t around to listen as Pasha made fumbling attempts to explain himself—and by the looks of it he definitely wasn’t—Pasha would proceed to do so to whoever was listening, because as he returned to roaming the labyrinthine campgrounds in what would appear to be avoidance of Sveta and Bozhko, he realized just how overdue such an explanation was.

  He wasn’t at the festival for what he could take away from the experience (a new poet to read, concept to mull, international collaboration to initiate), but for the experience itself—for the chance to roam patchy, bleached grasses in his Georgian vest, perhaps an occasional pipe between his hot, sandpapery lips, for good food and spontaneous conversation, often or always initiated by the other party. If he stood around for long enough, he was invariably approached by other poets, often female, who’d read his work and admired or even adored it, who weren’t shy or reticent with their opinions and seemed to believe that just having them was a source of pride. They wanted to let Pasha know that they considered him a poet of genius not getting his due, no, it’s true, he deserved far better treatment, a wider readership, international renown, and to be translated into every language imaginable, even Swahili. A scattered redhead claimed that his collection Ancestral Belt had been on her nightstand since 1995; a dark boy with emerald eyes, who might’ve been twelve, said that he’d been assigning Pasha’s Bestiary Cycle in both his Mythology of Poetics and Poetics of Mythology courses for a decade; a woman in her fifties with one arm in a giant cast (or a giant arm in a fitted cast) said that she’d recently read his poem “Black Arch” in one of her classes and rather liked it, though she found the wordplay at the beginning rather tiring and it could’ve easily been half as long, but even so it was memorable, which was more than could be said for the other poems assigned in that class. Pasha relished these encounters more than he let on, his regular life in Odessa devoid of them, but he usually quickly lost the actual content of the compliment, retaining only warmth, like having been awoken from a pleasant dream. He carried around this wonderfully incommunicable warmth for as long as the heat held, potentially an entire afternoon providing he didn’t happen to stumble into another encounter or a bit of news that froze him to the core, turning the saliva on his tongue to ice. But even when people weren’t approaching Pasha to tell him of the influence his poetry had on them, that influence was alive in the air. It was real. No one had to be reading his poetry, and he didn’t have to be writing it, and no mention of it had to be made, and still the influence was inarguably present, as present as the electromagnetic waves that miraculously allowed for cell-phone reception at the campgrounds in rural Georgia.

  But currently there was a malfunction. Though people approached Pasha throughout the afternoon, not only did the heat not hold, it failed to appear. Real time had resumed—Sveta and Bozhko found Pasha, took him by the underarms, and led the way to the tent not where the conundrum of translation was once and for all being resolved but to the one with the red cross on the front, where a fat village beauty in a white uniform pinched his cheeks, called him Pumpkin Stew (for that was what he looked like), slammed a bag of ice on his forehead, and said heatstroke at least a dozen times, which was odd, as heat was the one sensation Pasha lacked. Equipped with a water bottle, a cap, and a few warnings, he was released. A few hours later, he read aloud to a packed auditorium; in terms of attendance, enemies were far more devoted than friends. The auditorium was large and had walls, and it couldn’t have been on the campgrounds, but then where was it? This was bound to remain a mystery.

  After the reading Pasha proceeded to let loose at the Mongolian barbecue and the ensuing festivities, staying late into the evening, refilling his glass with punch, letting himself be drawn into a conversation with three women and one homosexual ballad-composer that proved not entirely as frivolous as he would’ve imagined it had he excused himself instantly in his regular fashion, or maybe it was just as frivolous but livelier and more nuanced, occasioned with moments worth having if you were in it for the experience itself. Ten days out of the year, he could make such an allowance. Despite all the genuine fun and enjoyment, of which he would’ve told the reporter from Znamya if she hadn’t lost her face, something was wrong. When the elevator took Pasha up to the forty-ninth floor, which he never realized was the top floor, thinking that there had to be another floor above, and after he managed to swipe the card so that the light turned green and let him into his room, where Sveta was already sleeping, the poor thing only able to take so much (though since when?), the oppressive mass again rolled over Pasha. First it crushed his toes, then it rolled off, and he thought with unspeakable relief that he’d been spared, but of course he was not.

  He kept the lights off, and not for fear of waking Sveta. As a rule the first to fall asleep, Pasha didn’t have this particular consideration installed in his brain. If a light had been needed, he wouldn’t have hesitated to turn it on, provided he was able to locate the switch (not always so easy in these tricky hotel rooms). Pasha sat in the armchair by the wall. It began to feel like a wheelchair, so he went to stand by the window. Since he wasn’t sleepy, he considered listening to music—nothing too serious, something modern and light, maybe Mingus. But he quickly stopped considering, knowing that he wasn’t about to listen to any music.

  The books that people mentioned when they approached him, Pasha realized, were old. The title he heard most often was Ancestral Belt, his first collection. The Bestiary Cycle was technically his third but truly his second (Letter After the Quake, dedicated to Renata Ostraya, didn’t count). He’d written these so long ago they no longer felt written at all. Meanwhile his recent books, those of the past five years or so, were never mentioned. The explanation for this could be as simple as time—books required it. A collection needed to sit, some more than others. Not all response was instantaneous. And readers, merely human beings with their flaws, their daily worries, their limited attention spans, were uncomfortable with a writer’s creative evolution. Biological evolution was
swallowed like a bitter pill, or a pill that used to be bitter and now came in improved gel-capsule form, as if morphing from monkeys into us were the most basic concept to fathom, not murky or bizarre or frustrating in the least, certainly nothing worth questioning, in fact pity the fool who still did—but if a poet made his name with sestinas, God forbid he should torture the public with a villanelle; if he traded in binary structures for free verse, all the worse for him. And that’s what Pasha had done, traded in something for something else, only it wasn’t as concrete as binary structures or free verse, and he couldn’t pinpoint precisely when the change had occurred. As a result he couldn’t be entirely certain it had been voluntary.

  Neither could he be sure the change had been his, considering he couldn’t remember the last time he’d willfully changed anything other than wives. For as long as he could remember, he’d been consuming the same kasha for breakfast, quenching his thirst with the same mineral water from a spring somewhere not far from his current whereabouts, listening to the same cantatas on his Discman, exercising his heart on the same promenade in the center of Odessa, exercising his soul at Sunday services in the same cathedral, making the same rounds of cafés and restaurants, eating inordinate quantities of the same watermelon from Kherson, bathing in the same section of the Black Sea, composing poems at an unvarying rate with the same steadfast zeal at the same predawn hour. Yet. With each passing year, his surroundings became less recognizable, he felt more and more uprooted. Constancy of habit didn’t buffer against a city, a nation, a society, perhaps a whole culture in decay. Though he could step outside and pass the places of his childhood, his schools, the hospital where his father had worked, the pediatric clinic where his mother had worked, it was as if the city had been moved to the moon—the structures were there, but the atmosphere had been sucked out. It was the irony of his life that he was more alienated and excluded in his native city than his family in their new land. He used to blame his mother, for not trying hard enough to stir him into action, for dying at the wrong time, in the wrong place, for everything not quite short of giving birth to him. Now he just missed her, Esther.