Evidently Pasha had failed to share this development with Efim, who claimed to be a dear old friend. He turned to Pasha and overplayed his hurt.
Pasha shrugged. My son is thirty-five—
Thirty-two, corrected Sveta.
He already has kids. And I’ve barely met his bride-to-be, but from the little I’ve seen—
Efim’s hand signaled Pasha to stop. There was no getting around it. News like this deserved a toast.
Frida lifted her vase of Coke and clinked timidly, then enthusiastically, with all across the table. Some people at the other end, having caught only the broadcast announcement, eyed her with interest, taking her, perhaps, for the future daughter-in-law. And how about the son himself? Would he be joining them for a celebratory drink? Where was the lucky young man? Pasha didn’t know. Pasha didn’t particularly care. The fuss was disturbing. People became strange when it involved news of this sort. Atavisms were activated. Their personalities abandoned them. They lost their cultivated whims and eccentricities, were reduced to elemental humanness. And they became hungry, wanting access. Pasha, instead of rising to the occasion and putting on the proud-father face, sharing an anecdote or two and accepting a pour of champagne, relenting a little in his absolute Pasha-ness, clenched his antisocial jaw and waited out the awkward moment until the subject was dropped and the table splintered into comfortable disunity.
Plates like flying saucers began colonizing tables with fantastic speed and adroitness. Food was not only what clung to the tines of the fork but also what filled ears. The corners of Frida’s eyes were salivating. Silverware mishaps, guffaws, the flashing hands of waiters — all were food. A man swayed over a piano, not making music but kneading air. Everything looked scrumptious, yet not entirely edible. No matter what she tried, there was a hint of turned eggplant. It was a while before she looked up. When she did, Pasha was transformed. He’d grown animated and wide-eyed, voluble, dynamic. Flanked by two men, one of them arresting, with geologic features and demonic eyes, an ethnic hat, and an articles-have-been-written-about-me air, the other quite plain, with a puffy pinkish face, large arms, and an ineffable quality — the kind of man to sneak into dreams and tinker with the dreamer’s perception of him. Pasha’s elbows rested on the table. His lower lip was pronounced, like that of a rabbi in a kitchen, painting. When either of the men spoke, Pasha’s eyes lifted to the heavens. He giggled often and abruptly.
The cloud of cigarette smoke thickened. Frida’s eyes burned, lungs ached, accustomed to American standards. She stepped outside for the closest thing this city had to fresh air, immediately followed by Sveta with her regenerating cigarette. Sveta gave Frida a look of sympathy, as if they were both suffering quietly through this occasion or this life, and exhaled into her face.
A lady with short orange hair came out to see where Sveta had gone, and in search of the lady with the orange hair came two others, and in a few minutes they were a huddle of gossiping ladies with jarring laughs and warring perfumes. Sveta apologized to Frida because they were being prevented from having a heart-to-heart. Her breath was pungent and the cracks of her lips stained blue. A Mediterranean wind turned the corner. Sveta’s unnaturally rigid hair split open, exposing a deformed ear. Frida studied it, mesmerized. But it was quickly returned to its box of hair, hidden away like all things of interest.
Frida’s phone rang — could it finally be Sanya, the lucky young man, the closest thing she had to a brother, whose adult voice she had yet to hear? Against all odds she succeeded in a casual allo. But it wasn’t Sanya. Once again she found herself being shouted at. It seemed not threatening but somehow informative. Not an ounce of meaning could be extracted. This time she felt that she deserved this treatment and that everybody knew she was getting it. But when she looked around, everybody was gone, the huddle of women dispersed; she stood alone on a curb across the street from a casino. There were no stars or cats, no excuses to linger.
Returning to the table, Frida overheard an unpleasant snippet in which Sveta was pointed at and referred to, in surreptitious English, as the Bride of Frankenstein. Then, during a baffling search for the restroom, Frida stumbled into Pasha being called, and not even with the decency of a whisper, a royal asshole suffering from a Jesus complex. She bent down to adjust a sandal strap. Pasha did have some talent, there was no denying that, but his poetic views were egregiously conservative. There were good poems, but there were too many poems — inspiration didn’t visit anybody on such a regular basis. And apparently he beat his ex-wife, but who wouldn’t have?
In the bathroom, three flights up and technically in a different building, yawning wives professed with pride to an inability to sleep in planes, trains, and automobiles, enthusiastically enumerating neuroses while a tall lady in a lavish gown vomited into the sink. Squeezing through a narrow, jagged passageway made by the backs of chairs, Frida’s butt was pinched. Her response was lethargic. A somnambulist would’ve about-faced quicker. The perpetrator was the plain man with the puffy face. He recoiled, reddening, but it did no good — slyness was built into the curve of his nonexistent lips. Zeal, for everything, oozed from his pores.
Pardon, mademoiselle, he said, and pointed to the woman for whom the pinch had been intended. Two sensations overcame Frida: horror that her butt was interchangeable with that matronly derriere, and love…
Of course out of everyone I had to pick Pasha’s future daughter-in-law to harass. He already thinks I’m a creep.
I’m not—
Going to tell? If you want, I can do it again.
That’s OK, said Frida, maybe some other time.
Good luck to you. You’re marrying into literary aristocracy!
Frida smiled sweetly, but the words left her feeling unsettled in a Shakespearean sort of way, as if everybody were in cloaks and disguises, saying one thing, meaning another.
Unlike all the moths in the light, Pasha stayed in the same seat with his elbows on the table. Frida, in the dual role of Niece and Daughter-in-Law, became a routine pit stop for the poets. One by one they came to tell her in what high esteem they held Pavel Robertovich. Her uncle was the Brodsky-of-our-time, dorogoy drug i velikiy poét (a dear friend and great poet), whose poetry built emotion through a fantastic accrual of detail, whose situation in Odessa was an impossible one, and were he not such an obstinate, principled, intransigent man, he would’ve left Odessa long ago; that this town had been abandoned by history and didn’t need a martyr in the shape of an aging, bearded Russian-Jewish-Christian poet (though it is quite charming when you think about it); that he should’ve moved to New York or at least Moscow, cosmopolitan cities in which he had friends, readers, supporters ready to help him in any way they could, where he could meet more like-minded people, or at least those with common interests and thicker wallets and an appreciation, no matter how misguided, for what he was doing, for what was essentially his life project; that though ideally he should’ve made this move decades ago, it still wasn’t too late — however, there was no point in telling him this, he simply wouldn’t listen, the man couldn’t be reasoned with; that in Odessa he had only enemies and his tactic of ignoring them for half the year, then launching ferocious, no-longer-relevant counterattacks on his LiveJournal page during the other half was just making these enemies more rabid; that he wasn’t taking proper care of himself and looked far worse this year than he had the last (this surprised Frida — her uncle seemed incapable of looking better or worse, as if centuries couldn’t touch him); that Sveta should put him on a diet; that he had never before seemed so happy with his domestic situation, and thank God he’d finally gotten rid of that snake Nadia; that a lot of people may be saying things to her about Pasha but not even all of his friends, so-called, had his best interests in mind, and it would be wise for her to listen with a grain of salt; that particularly the Berlin group had to be kept an eye on; that it’s not hard to understand why people got so sentimental about Odessa; that in fact it was impossible to understand; that perhaps what annoyed people most was that Pavel Robertovich didn’t drink like a real poet; that what possibly irritated some was that Pasha never gave praise, or at least was terribly stingy in that department; that he refused to gossip; that according to him everything fell under the rubric of gossip; that he never met anybody on the other person’s terms; that he expected others to read his work but didn’t take the time to read theirs; that people were fallible, and such things got to them; that she, Frida, actually bore a resemblance to her uncle, which wasn’t immediately obvious but emerged upon speaking to her, as she somehow had the same manner, the way she held her head, and also something in the eye and forehead region.