Yelena Akhtiorskaya - Panic in a Suitcase

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.

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 they 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?