Yelena Akhtiorskaya - Panic in a Suitcase

If I hate her for anything, said Sveta, it’s that!

On the contrary, I should thank her. Regardless, I was very determined, fanatical — there could’ve been a nuclear disaster and violent revolution simultaneously and I wouldn’t have looked up from my notebook. The dynamic was bound to change. It was inevitable. I wasn’t going to be her secret for long. In the meantime Nadia began doing chores around the house. She blamed me for the fact that she had no time to write. But I never asked her to be a proper housewife. There was this other girl, Dora. Mama was in love with her, and God knows why this Dora wanted me. She would’ve made an excellent Jewish housewife. But I didn’t want an excellent Jewish housewife.

You never mentioned this Dora. Go on.

I wanted Nadia, with all her moods. I didn’t expect the next Akhmatova to iron pants or make borscht. All I required was a clean pair of underwear. Her pregnancy filled me with dread. It was the end for her. She knew it, too, and my theory is that’s why she hastened it. Before Sanya she was still managing to compose a poem or two, however painstakingly. Sanya was an excuse to give up. A good excuse, too — he was one of those shrieking, no-sleep, head-to-toe-rash babies.

I’ve seen the pictures — he’s adorable!

A few years later, Nadia’s resentment built to such a pitch that she abruptly quit everything that was maintaining the cohesion of our existence as a family. But by that point there was no more writing for her. The worst was when I tried to encourage her. That’s the distant past! she’d yell. I sacrificed my potential so that you could recognize yours. Banal, prepackaged sentiments neatly wrapped with a bow on top, like she got them at the resentful-wife store. And when she used them, you could tell how much she was tapping into their universal power. She was destroyed and destructive and had to say something.

What about when Ancestral Belt came out? Was she supportive?

The book just confirmed her suspicions about the course our lives were taking. She was inwardly gloating. It gave her reason to be more merciless. It should’ve been a great time for me, but it was horrible. That was the summer Mama got sick and I went to visit my family in New York, where I met the most beautiful, delicate, birdlike young lady. Guess who.

Sveta, said Sveta. But what you’re referring to was our second meeting. The bird lady made no impression whatsoever the first time around.

The period of Pasha’s life from meeting Nadia to meeting Sveta had been selected for constant retelling. It wasn’t allowed to fade, on the contrary often obtaining an added dose of color. Had Nadia shunned Yevtushenko’s advances in Pasha’s first narration? From Sveta’s exclamations of surprise, horror, disbelief, you’d never guess that this was neither the first nor the tenth time she was hearing the account. Because it was impossible to comprehend — how could Pasha, a poet of genius, a sensitive, intelligent, loving, extraordinary man, have ended up in such a hellish entanglement? It didn’t make sense. Pasha was made to revisit the beginning on a regular basis, and Nadia got to be ever more celebrated and beautiful. Hearing this didn’t upset Sveta. It shed light on the unambiguous tragedy of Pasha’s life. He’d been tricked into marriage!

During the years of Pasha’s complaining, Sveta had indeed been taking notes. She was mindful not to repeat Nadia’s offenses — there were no inquiries as to Pasha’s whereabouts, household duties weren’t a suitable topic of conversation, and Pasha’s workspace was sacred ground. He could sit for hours, if need be days, undisturbed. He began to detest the isolation of his desk, preferring to work at the crammed kitchen table while Sveta pranced stoveside.

Proximity had to be maintained. They always occupied the same tenth of the apartment, and the apartment was small — no wall moldings or ten-meter ceilings, no Turkish rugs, scenic view, ventilation. The old apartment was on the fourth floor, with exaggerated windows overlooking Potemkin Square. This apartment was on the first floor, or not even. You had to step down to enter. The window (the only one was in the kitchen) looked out at crotch level onto a courtyard whose slabs of concrete had proved inadequate to contain a spoiled earth. It was a ditch.

But the apartment didn’t matter! The old apartment had mattered. This apartment was perfect precisely because it wasn’t the old apartment, which had belonged to the Nasmertovs since midcentury and in which now resided Nadia and a frequently rearranging group of her distant relations. Nadia had turned out to be not just emotionally needy and mentally unstable but vengeful and greedy. Irrelevant — here was Sveta with a plate of cold, slippery herring and a dill-veined boiled potato. Around the house she wore what could only be called a nightie, terminating at upper thigh. She had schoolgirl legs, skinny with shapely knees. Her thighs were bluish and the inner parts always sweaty, as she was a touch knock-kneed. You wouldn’t notice unless you really looked. A shriveled ear poked through her hair. Pasha had grabbed it once at the foggy instant of sexual release, cementing a habit.

Though their affair had already spanned a decade, Pasha discovered that Sveta spent most of her life in this nightie when they convened domestically last November. By all means an incredible surprise. The nightie had a tattered lace trim and stretched-out shoulder straps worn to a thread. It wasn’t unusual for a breast to pop out. Sveta’s avoidance of bras was as fundamental as her avoidance of complete sentences, black anything, and public functions, and her breasts, though not large, were demanding. They required attention. Basically she was always naked, yet she moved too nimbly and constantly, blurred by motion. The nightie was like a veil being deftly maneuvered. You were never sure if you saw what you thought you saw. If Sveta ever came to a complete stop, the nightie would’ve been revealed for what it was — a worn scrap of fabric insufficient to cover a child’s torso. Pasha had taken it once for a dishrag. He’d wiped his soapy hands on it.

There was really just one problem with the nightie: Sveta smoked. She had crates of long, slender, minty cigarettes. Pasha’s sensitive lungs deterred her from puffing away in the house. Not even in February had she bothered to throw something over her alabaster shoulders, softer and whiter than the lightly powdered snow, as she stood out on the porch, sometimes wandering into the courtyard if a friendly cat presented itself, and got her fix. The nicotine’s effect was to calm and focus — Sveta was at her most inert when she smoked. The neighbors got a show. On the floor above lived a cadaverous old widower who would’ve kicked the bucket long ago if Sveta in her nightie didn’t revive his pulse on an hourly basis. And to be honest, it was in their interest that he not delay, as he had the more desirable apartment.

Sveta stood in the doorway, telephone in extended hand. Pasha, piled under three plaid blankets, shivered just from looking at her. What a phenomenon it was, the shiksa constitution.

Is it Tochka?

It’s your sister.

Say I’m not feeling well.

Sveta covered the mouthpiece. I did. She’s insisting.

Pasha took the phone, looked at it for a moment, and pressed it to his ear, conchlike, as if awaiting the sounds of the sea.

Hello-o. Anybody there? asked Marina’s voice, which seemed to live naturally inside the plastic receiver.

Where else? said Pasha.

You could speak up. Sveta says you’re still not better. It’s because you don’t take care of yourself.

Sveta’s taking care of me.

There was a split second of silence, registered like a pinprick, and a subject switch. Papa’s doing fine, she said. He’s out for a walk. At first he protests, No, I won’t go, I don’t feel well, my hypertension, my constipation, leave me alone, it’s muggy out, but then he thanks me, So nice outside, the sunset, the seagulls. Anyway, he wanted me to ask when you’re planning to go check on the dacha.