You don’t sound like a poet, said Frida.
I’m a computer programmer, he said.
She refrained from asking the obvious question, soon answered when a bullfighting aficionado slapped Efim on the back and said, Hello, good man, I’m glad to see some things never change — your wife is still the life of the party.
I’m surprised Pasha’s not going to this Bulgarian carnival, Frida said to change the subject, as that comment had visibly diminished Efim’s spirits.
It’s Georgian, and what do you mean he’s not going?
We leave Monday, said tipsy Sveta, trying charmingly to pull together and not sound tipsy in the least. Did Pasha not tell you? He must’ve forgotten to mention it.
What about the wedding?
As it stands as of the present moment, we fly in the morning after the wedding, but not to worry, I’m about to fix that. It’s all my fault. Pasha’s lousy with dates. I should’ve known not to trust him with tickets.
But — said Frida.
No, said Sveta.
Then maybe while you’re away, I’ll stay at the dacha.
The dacha’s gone, said Pasha, evidently tuned in to the conversation. It’s gone. Finis. Poof. Please pass that along.
THIRTEEN
PASHA HADN’T BEEN INVITED to participate in the Odessa Conference of Literature. Not only did they not ask him to give a reading, instead scraping the bottom of the barrel for the few local poets not yet too far gone along the path of drunken incoherence or drunken vulgarity and incoherence or, the most terrible of all, of sober attempts at meaningful and/or innovative poetry, but they — the organizers, whom Pasha didn’t mention, perhaps deeming it too obvious, were those very bottom-of-the-barrel poets themselves — didn’t even invite him to take part in any of the marginal events, the festival fluff, which was how Pasha knew, though of course he would’ve known regardless, that he was being subjected to purposeful banishment. To put it simply: blacklisted.
From the acute pang and magnitude of hurt accompanying his exclusion, it would seem that this hadn’t happened last year. Because Pasha didn’t hold grudges, the wounds inflicted on him were always unforeseen. Scar tissue never formed. And he’d used the year to convince himself that it’d been a genuine blunder on some novice organizer’s part. Worse errors were known to occur in Ukraine. Someone could’ve easily forgotten to enter his name into the schedule just because he was too obvious a candidate for every single slot. The human brain had a funny way. A more probable explanation, he knew, was that they’d been teaching him a lesson. In that case the volumes of Google-able backlash from nonlocals should’ve taught a lesson in reverse.
At the conference he had spies. He didn’t have to ask — they volunteered their reports. His name circulated at public panels and during interviews, but most frequently in the gossip realm he so opposed. The volunteer spies had a great deal to disclose and did so with relish. Pasha was grateful. Motives weren’t questioned. He developed an addiction to their scoops, collecting evidence of victimhood. These purported friends were like drug dealers providing a steady supply of slanderous material. Pasha didn’t differentiate — a trivial scrap of spiteful blather from a notorious drunkard affected him no less than a six-thousand-word, vitriol-spewing, undigested work of so-called scholarship by a prominent critic in a widely read journal.
Pasha sulked around the house, not amused by Frida’s equally sulky accompaniment. She treated the moping of others as a challenge — could she mope to match? Several worries were on her mind: that it was already Saturday yet she was no closer to whatever miraculous intervention on the part of fate she’d been hoping for, that tomorrow she’d be faced with the decision of whether to accompany Pasha and Sveta to church or remain loyal to her condescending attitude toward all religious observance, that the day after tomorrow Pasha and Sveta were set to depart for their festival, and that Sanya hadn’t made the effort to see her on any of these days.
To escape the gloom, Pasha went to make the rounds of the corner marts, groceries, and shops on a fruitless search for a particular brand of Georgian mineral water, which he claimed was the only tonic for the gastric tumult that caused him to visit the bathroom as often as he checked his email for updates.
Can he possibly be this naïve? Frida asked once he’d gone, seizing the opportunity to reason with Sveta, who sat Indian style in her nightie on the living room floor, working on a watercolor. I mean, Frida clarified, he’s not an idiot. Doesn’t he realize they’ll keep doing this to him as long as he refuses to build defenses or change his ways? He makes it fun for them! Why won’t he just tell them to go fuck themselves? They’re nobodies! Instead he acts all wounded and helpless. How can he still be surprised by this bullshit? More important, how can he still bear to live in this city? If it’s so miserable, why won’t he budge?
Sveta spilled water onto the canvas. Frida gasped. Sveta’s hand had twitched, and she’d spilled too much. But after appraising, Sveta tipped the jar again, spilling even more. It’s not my job to analyze, she said. Dropping her paintbrush, she looked Frida in the eye. The wife of a poet, she explained, has three responsibilities: to feed him, to believe unconditionally in his genius, and to leave him alone. These posed no difficulty for her. Her ex-husband, Artem Muser (Hungarian parentage), an eminent philosopher and bassist for the rock group Rote Goat, had also required the three, though with each passing year addenda had emerged. The second principle was key. As long as she’d believed in Artem, the rest was a pleasure. But somewhere along the way, she had lost her faith. Don’t get me wrong, she said, Artem is great at what he does — he’s a success by anybody’s standards. But a genius is a genius. Would his philosophical oeuvre be contemplated a century from then? Would the music of his band be moshed to? The unlikelihood of either never bothered him. He was cruising. He’d built a solid reputation and was reaping the rewards. Ranked among the leading philosophers in the country based on a sensationalistic doctoral dissertation, he was happy to sit on panels about Schopenhauer’s toilet and be told by the sleaziest department chair imaginable that out of all introductory courses his was the quickest to fill to capacity. And it was enough that his band played the annual Ukrainian heavy-metal fest. Occasionally they gathered a good crowd in Kiev.
Sveta, however, had expected more. She began to regard Artem as a regular man — gifted, endowed with a strong will, but nothing extraordinary. And feeding a regular man was little pleasure. In this new light, a few other trifles had come to her attention: Artem was a shameless philanderer, never asked a single question about her existence, and mentioned her “barren womb” regularly. These revelations had coincided, quite fortuitously, with the arrival of Pasha.
Your uncle is a genius the likes of which are distributed over time and across the earth with an exceedingly spare hand, said Sveta. I was sure of this from the very start. Sveta’s gaze went coy. Do you want to hear how we met?
Frida nodded, her foot going numb.
It was actually in New York, and I probably shouldn’t be telling you this, but it was a July evening in ’93. My husband had dragged me to Renata Ostraya’s party. I really didn’t want to go. They’d had a brief thing, but that wasn’t the issue. I’d lost my appetite after a weeklong flu, and for me Renata’s parties were strictly about gastronomic potential. Unable to partake, I was forced to interact. For an hour or two I nodded beside Artem but was drawn back to the table. Its proximity comforted. Instead of sampling dishes, I sampled conversations, overhearing fragments, rarely of interest. That’s how I spotted Pasha. A group of men were having one of those rambling discussions about everything at once. They were impressed with one another, this was clear. But they were standing by the table and popping pigs in a blanket into their mouths. I began to eavesdrop, my attention entirely given over to the gawky man with the unkempt beard — he wasn’t like the rest. He was different. I was just standing there when one of them, a chubby man with a pink face and no eyebrows — you saw him last night, Andrei Fishman — turned to me and said, Want to join in, or are we blocking the sausages? Stupefied, I’d said, Sausages. So what did Andrei do? He took a pig in a blanket from the pile and said, Open up. Can you imagine? I was mortified! He was dangling it in front of my nose, but my jaw was clamped shut. Nothing could’ve pried it open. That was when Pasha stepped in. He tilted back his head. He opened his mouth.