The Suitcase

A Poplin Shirt

MY WIFE SAYS, “It’s madness, living with a man who sticks around simply because he’s too lazy…”

My wife always exaggerates. Although it’s true, I do try to avoid unnecessary trouble. I eat whatever’s within reach. Get my hair cut when my appearance becomes less than human. But when I do, I have it shaved. Then I don’t have to get another cut for three months.

In short, I’m reluctant to leave the house. I want to be left alone.

When I was a child, my nanny, Luiza Genrikhovna, did everything distractedly, living in fear of arrest. Once she dressed me in shorts and shoved both legs into one opening. I walked around like that all day. I was four, but I remember that day well. I knew that I had been dressed wrong, but I kept quiet. I didn’t want to change. I still don’t.

I remember many stories like that. Even as a child I was prepared to put up with all sorts of things in order to avoid hassles.

I used to drink a fair amount; consequently, I hung out in some strange places. That made many people think that I was sociable, whereas all you had to do was sober me up to see my sociability vanish.

For all that, I cannot live alone. I don’t remember where the electric bill is. I don’t know how to iron or do laundry. And above all, I don’t earn a lot. Ideally, I’d love to live alone, but with someone nearby.

My wife always exaggerates. “I know why you’re still living with me. Shall I tell you why?”

“Well, then, why?”

“You’re just too lazy to buy a folding bed.”

I could answer, “How about you? Why didn’t you buy the bed? Why didn’t you abandon me in our most difficult years? You, who can mend, wash, put up with people you barely know, and most importantly, earn money!”

We met twenty years ago in Leningrad. I even remember that it was a Sunday. February 18. Election day.

Block captains were going from house to house, urging residents to vote as early as possible. I was in no hurry. I’d skipped voting about three times already. And not out of dissident considerations, either, but rather out of an abhorrence for meaningless acts.

Then the bell rang. On the doorstep stood a young woman in a fall jacket. She looked like a schoolteacher, meaning a bit of an old maid. True, she didn’t have glasses on, but she was holding a notebook in her hand. She looked into the notebook and said my surname.

I said, “Come in, warm up. Have some tea.” I was mortified by my legs sticking out from beneath my robe. Legs are the least expressive part of the body in our family. And my robe was stained, too.

“Elena Borisovna,” the girl said, introducing herself, “your canvasser. You haven’t voted yet.” It was less a question than a restrained rebuke.

I repeated, “Would you like some tea?” I added, for propriety’s sake, “My mother’s inside.”

Mother had a headache, which didn’t keep her from shouting out, “Just you try eating my halva!”

I said, “We’ll have plenty of time to vote.”

And here Elena Borisovna made a completely unexpected speech: “I know that these elections are pure obscenity, but what can I do? I have to bring you to the polls. Otherwise, I won’t be allowed to go home.”

“I see,” I said. “But you should be more careful. You won’t get a pat on the head for talk like that.”

“You can be trusted. I understood that immediately, as soon as I saw Solzhenitsyn’s portrait.”*

“That’s Dostoevsky. But I respect Solzhenitsyn, too.”

Afterwards we had a modest breakfast. Mother cut us a piece of halva after all.

Talk naturally turned to literature. If Lena mentioned Gladilin, I asked, “Tolya Gladilin?”

If Shukshin came up, I checked, “Vasya Shukshin?”

When we started talking about Akhmadulina, I exclaimed softly, “Bellochka!”*

Then we went outside. The houses were decorated with bunting. Candy wrappers lay in the snow. Our janitor, Grisha, was showing off his ratine coat.

I didn’t feel like voting – not because I was lazy. The fact was, I liked Elena Borisovna, and as soon as we had all voted, they’d let her go home.

We went to the movies to see Ivan’s Childhood. The film was good enough for me to treat it with condescension. In that period I only approved of detective movies, because they let me relax. But Tarkovsky’s movies* I praised, condescendingly – and with a hint that Tarkovsky had been waiting for almost six years for a screenplay from me.

After the movie I took Elena to the House of Writers. I was sure I’d run into somebody famous. I could count on friendly greetings from Goryshin, a drunken bear hug from Wolf, a quick chat with Yefimov or Konetsky. After all, I was a so-called Young Writer. Even Daniil Granin knew my face.*

Once there were many literary celebrities in Leningrad, such as Kornei Chukovsky, Nikolai Oleynikov, Mikhail Zoshchenko, Daniil Kharms, and so on.* After the war their number decreased sharply. Some were shot for one reason or another, others moved to Moscow…

We went upstairs to the restaurant; we ordered wine, sandwiches and pastries. I’d planned to order an omelette but changed my mind. My big brother always told me, “You don’t know how to eat coloured food.” I counted my money without taking my hand from my pocket.

The room was empty. Reshetov sat by the door, wearing his medals and reading a book. He was so deeply engrossed that it had to be one of his own opuses. I was willing to bet its title was I’m Coming to You, the People!

We drank. I recounted three stories about Yevgeny Yevtushenko,* which I’d seen with my very own eyes.

But no celebrities showed up, although there was a steady increase in customers. The belletrist Goryansky headed for the window, his artificial leg creaking. The poets Dmitry Chikin and Boris Steinberg were at the bar. Chikin was saying, “You’re great at philosophical digressions, Borya.”

“And you, Dima, are great at interior monologues,” Steinberg replied.

Neither Chikin nor Steinberg could be classified as a celebrity. Goryansky was famous for strangling a guard in a German concentration camp.

A fairly well-known critic, Khalupovich, walked by. He stared at me a long time and then said, “Excuse me, I thought you were Lev Melinder…”

We ordered a couple of brandies. I was running out of money, and still there were no celebrities. At this rate, Elena Borisovna would never learn that I was a promising young writer.

And then Danchkovsky poked his head into the restaurant. In a pinch, he could be called famous.

Once upon a time, two brothers came from Shklov to Leningrad. Savely and Leonid Danchikovsky tried their wings in literature – they wrote songs, jingles, skits. First they wrote together, then each one separately. A year later their paths diverged even more sharply: Leonid shortened his name to Danch, but he remained a Jew.

Savely shortened his name only by a letter – to Danchkovsky — and turned into a Russian Pole. Gradually a nationality gap developed between them.

“Werewolf!” Leonid would shout. “Drunken goy!”

“Shut up, kike face!” Savely would respond.

A while after that, the campaign against “cosmopolites” began. Leonid went to prison; by then Savely had graduated from the Institute of Marxist-Leninism. He published articles in the major journals, then his first book came out. The critics began talking about him. In time he began to produce Leninorrhoea.

First he wrote a book called Volodya’s Childhood, then a novella called A Boy from Simbirsk, then a two-volume set, Fiery Youth, and finally the trilogy Arise, Ye Pris’ners of Starvation! When he’d exhausted Lenin’s biography, Danchkovsky started on related themes: Lenin and Children, Lenin and Music, Lenin and Art, and Lenin and Agriculture. All the books were translated into many languages. Danchkovsky grew rich; he was awarded a medal of honour. His brother was awarded a posthumous rehabilitation.

Danchkovsky knew me well, since he had been head of our Writer’s Union chapter for the past year. And here he was in the restaurant.

I lowered my voice and whispered to Elena Borisovna, “Look – Danchkovsky himself! Wild success… sure to get the Lenin Prize.”

Danchkovsky headed for the corner farthest from the jukebox. As he passed us, he slowed down. I raised my glass familiarly.

Danchkovsky, without a greeting, said clearly, “I read your humour piece in Aurora. It’s crap.”

We stayed in the restaurant till eleven. The polling station had closed. Then the restaurant closed. My mother was home with her headache; we went for a stroll along the Fontanka embankment.

Elena Borisovna astonished me by her docility. Or not docility, exactly – more a kind of indifference to the realities of life, as if everything that happened were no more than a flicker on a screen.

She forgot about the polls, neglected her duties. As it turned out, she never even got around to voting herself. And for what? For the sake of an unclear relationship with a man who wrote unsuccessful humour pieces.

I didn’t vote, either, of course; I also neglected my civic duty. But I’m a special case. Are we alike, then?

We have twenty years of marriage behind us – twenty years of mutual isolation and indifference to real life. I at least have a stimulus, a goal, an illusion, a hope. What does she have? Only our daughter and indifference.

I don’t remember Lena ever arguing or disagreeing. I doubt if she ever once said a confident, resounding “Yes” or a firm, severe “No”.

Changes of scene, faces, voices, good and evil hurried by as if on TV, while my beloved, with an occasional glance towards the screen, had her mind on more important things.

Deciding that Mother was asleep by now, I turned home. I didn’t even say, “Come with me,” to Elena Borisovna. I didn’t even take her by the hand. We simply found ourselves at home. That was twenty years ago.

In those twenty years, our friends fell in love, married and divorced. They wrote poems and novels about it all. They moved from one republic to another; they changed jobs, convictions, habits, became dissidents and alcoholics, tried to kill others or themselves. Marvellous, mysterious worlds arose and collapsed with a roar all around us. Like taut strings, human relations snapped. Our friends were reborn and died in the search for happiness.

And us? We faced all the temptations and horrors of life with our only gift — indifference. What is more solid than a castle built on sand? What is more durable and dependable in family life than a mutual lack of principles? What could be more stable than two hostile states each incapable of defending itself?

I worked at a large newspaper. My salary was around a hundred roubles a month, plus a few negligible extras. I also remember an increase of four roubles a month “for mastering more modern methods of management”.

Like most journalists, I dreamt of writing a novel. And, unlike most journalists, I actually worked at it. But my manuscripts were rejected by the most progressive periodicals.

Now I can only be glad. Thanks to the censors, my apprenticeship continued for seventeen years. The stories I had wanted to publish in those years seem absolutely hopeless now. It’s bad enough that one was called ‘Faina’s Fate’.

Lena didn’t read my stories. I didn’t show them to her, and she didn’t want to take the initiative.

A woman can do three things for a Russian writer: she can feed him, she can sincerely believe in his genius and she can leave him alone. By the way, the third does not preclude the second and first.

Lena was not interested in my stories. I’m not even sure she had a clear idea of where I worked. She did know that I wrote.

I knew roughly as much about her.

At first my wife worked in a beauty shop. After the business with the elections, she was fired. Then she became a proofreader. Then, to my surprise, she graduated from a publishing institute. She began working for some sports publication, if I’m not mistaken. She made twice my salary.

It’s hard to understand what kept us together. Our conversations were mostly on household business. We each had our own set of friends. We even read different books. My wife would just pick up the nearest book and read from wherever it opened. That used to anger me. Then I realized that she always ended up reading good books, whereas if I open a book at random it’s sure to be Virgin Soil Upturned.*

What bound us together? How are human ties formed, anyway? It’s not a simple question. For instance, I have three cousins. All three are drunkards and hooligans. I love one, can take or leave the second, and barely know the third…

And so we lived, side by side, but separate. On rare occasions we exchanged presents. Sometimes I’d say, “I ought to give you flowers, just for a laugh.” Lena would reply, “I have everything I need.”

I didn’t expect gifts, either. It suited me fine. I knew one family: the husband worked from morning till night; the wife watched TV and shopped, and would say things like, “I bought Marik some gorgeous velvet curtains for his birthday!”

We lived like this for four years. Then our daughter, Katya, was born. There was unexpected seriousness about it and a sense of the miraculous. We had been two, and suddenly there was another person – cranky, noisy, demanding care.

We didn’t raise our daughter, we merely loved her. Especially since she was sickly from the age of five months. After our daughter’s birth it became clear that we were married. Katya acted as our marriage certificate.

I remember being at the Aurora editorial offices one day with the baby in her carriage. I was picking up a small fee. The clerk opened a file and said, “Sign here.” She added, “We deducted sixteen roubles for childlessness.”

“But I have a daughter,” I said.

“You have to bring the appropriate document.”

“Here.” I took a pink package out of the carriage and set it carefully on the chief accountant’s desk. And saved sixteen roubles that way.

My relationship with my wife didn’t change – almost didn’t change. Now we had a common concern along with our common indifference.

Once Lena was at work while I was held up at home. I was looking for some necessary papers, as usual – a copy of an editorial contract, if I’m not mistaken. I dug around in the chests. Yanked drawers out of the desk. I even looked in the night table.

Then, under a pile of books, magazines and old letters, I found an album. A small, almost pocket-sized photograph album – about fifteen sheets of thick cardboard with a dove embossed on the cover.

I opened it. The early photographs were yellowed and cracked. Some were missing corners. In one, a round-faced little girl cautiously petted a shaggy dog with its ears back. In another, a girl of about six hugged a homemade doll. Both looked sad and lost.

Next was a family photo — mother, father and daughter. The father was wearing a long raincoat and a straw hat. Just the tips of his fingers showed below the sleeves. His wife wore a heavy sweater with puffed sleeves, and she had curls tucked into a sheer kerchief. The girl had turned sharply, making her short fall coat fly open. Something had caught her attention outside the frame – maybe a stray dog. Behind them, through the trees, was the façade of Pushkin’s lycée in Tsarskoye Selo.

Later came relatives with tense, artificial smiles: an elderly, mustachioed railroad man in uniform, a lady beside a bust of Lenin, a youth on a motorcycle. Then came a sailor, or a cadet. Even in the picture you could see how carefully he had shaved. A girl holding a bouquet of lilies of the valley was peering into his face.

One whole page was taken up by a glossy school photo, four rows of frightened, tense, frozen faces. Not a single cheerful child. In the centre was a group of teachers, two with medals – veterans, probably – and the class matron. She was easy to spot. The old woman was embracing two schoolgirls who had forced smiles. On the left in the third row was my wife – the only one not looking at the camera.

I recognized her in every photograph. In a small picture with a fixed group of skiers. In a tiny photo taken in front of a kolkhoz library. And even in an over-exposed snapshot of a crowd, among barely discernible members of a youth choir.

I recognized the grim girl with worn shoes. The embarrassed young lady in a cheap bathing suit under a florid sign saying “City of Yevpatoriya”. The student in a scarf near the library. And everywhere my wife seemed the most unhappy.

I turned a few more pages. I saw a young man in a worker’s cap, an old woman shielding her face, an unknown ballerina.

I came across a picture of the actor Yakovlev,* a postcard. At the bottom, in a calligraphic hand, a fellow named Rafik Abdulayev had written, “Lena! Art demands the whole man, with nothing to spare.”

I turned to the last page, and I caught my breath. I don’t know why I was so surprised. I felt my cheeks turn red.

I saw a square photograph a bit larger than a postage stamp: a narrow forehead, unshaven cheeks, the face of a seedy matador. It was a picture of me. From last year’s ID card, I think – I could make out traces of the seal on the white edge.

I sat without moving for about three minutes. The clock ticked in the foyer. A compressor clacked outside. I heard the elevator creaking. And I just sat.

Yet if you think about it, what had actually happened? Nothing much: a wife had put a picture of her husband in a photo album. That’s normal.

But I was morbidly agitated. It was hard for me to concentrate, to understand the reason. I suddenly realized the seriousness of everything. If I was only now feeling this for the first time, then how much love had been lost over the long years?

I didn’t have the strength to think it through. I never knew that love could be so strong and so sharp. I thought, “If my hands are shaking now, how will I feel in the future?”

And so I got my coat and went to work.

About six years passed and emigration began. Jews began talking about their historic homeland. Before, all a real man needed was a sheepskin jacket and a Ph.D. Now you had to have an Israeli visa, too. Every intellectual dreamt of one, even if he had no intention of emigrating. Just to have one, just in case.

First, real Jews left. They were followed by citizens of less certain extraction. A year after that, Russians were let out. A friend of ours, an Orthodox priest, left with Israeli papers.

And then my wife decided to emigrate. While I decided to stay.

It’s hard to say why I did. Apparently I hadn’t reached the breaking point, or there were still some vague possibilities I wanted to explore. Or maybe I had unconscious yearnings for repression. That happens: no Russian intellectual who hasn’t been in prison is worth a damn.

I was astonished by Lena’s determination. She had seemed dependent and docile, and suddenly she made such a serious, definite decision.

She acquired foreign documents with red seals. She was visited by stern, bearded refuseniks who left instructions on cigarette paper and looked at me suspiciously. I didn’t believe it until the last minute. It was all too incredible, like a trip to Mars.

I swear I didn’t believe it until the last minute. I knew but didn’t believe. That’s the way things usually are.

And that damned minute came. The documents were in order, the visa had been obtained. Katya gave away her collections of candy wrappers and stamps to her girlfriends. All that remained was to buy the plane tickets.

My mother wept. Lena was overwhelmed by worries. I kept to the background. I hadn’t exactly blocked her view of the horizon before, but now she had no time for me at all.

And Lena went for the tickets. She came back with a box. She walked up to me and said, “I had some money left over. This is for you.”

Inside the box was an imported poplin shirt. Made in Romania, if I’m not mistaken.

“Well,” I said, “thanks.” It was a decent shirt – simple, good quality. Long live Comrade Ceauşescu!

But where would I go in it? Really, where would I go?