New Fiction: “Up close, he saw that she was way beyond his league: in other words, exactly his type.” From the magazine’s Decameron Project.
New Fiction: “Up close, he saw that she was way beyond his league: in other words, exactly his type.” From the magazine’s Decameron Project.
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The Decameron Project
Rachel Kushner: ‘The Girl with the Big Red Suitcase,’ a Short Story
ByRachel KushnerJuly 7, 2020
The Decameron Project
New Fiction
In that old tale by Poe, they locked out the commoners and locked in the plague, the uninvited guest to their costume ball. Their mistake is a lesson for the reader only, since the highborn fools in the story all die. I’ve read the tale, taken the lesson. And yet, here I am in a walled castle and with a small group of people I might describe, if pressed, as dissolute snobs.
This was an accident. I got here well before refrigerated trucks idled outside the municipal morgue, down the road. When I arrived in this country, life remained fairly normal. The virus was not close. I “felt sorry” for the people of Wuhan and continued with my own plans, as an author doing frivolous author-y things, like visiting a castle where I’d been invited for a week’s stay, alongside people whose sole commonality was to pretend these kinds of bizarre sinecures are normal. I’d brought young Alex, who inspires wrestling matches among dowagers competing to have him at their brunch. His beauty is of a dissident, orphaned hue. Or darker. He looks, in fact, a lot like Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, but I promise he has bombed nothing except a few social occasions to which he arrived unfashionably late.
We were waiting it out, this mess that no person on Earth will escape. At first, to cozen our own distress, Alex and I treated our castlemates as bad objects of amusement. We poked fun at the Charlemagne biographer and the pajamalike “house master’s” robe he wore to dinner, his obsession with the Duke of Wellington, with dueling, with all manner of what Alex summarized as post-Napoleonic torpor. We derided the journalist who believed anyone left of center was on Putin’s payroll, this mythic payroll, so insidious we almost wondered if we were on it ourselves. And we laughed at the Norwegian author for the fact that he was, we were told, the most important author in Scandinavia, and yet, unlike all other Scandinavians, this extremely important and famous man didn’t speak even a single word of English. He gathered with the rest of us but contributed only an air of dazed elsewhereness, seemingly unconcerned with the arch Anglo-banter that ricocheted around him. We never laughed at his wife, who translated for him, as some women do even for men who speak the language. She shared none of her own thoughts, this handsome woman with an indeterminate European accent, and instead sat on the terrace, smoking and silently watching the rest of us cheapen the air with our opinions.
As reality set in that we were stuck here, they became like relatives, people you didn’t choose but must love. The Charlemagne biographer’s habit of referring to Alex asHomo Juvenilisbecame a trend. I was working on a novel about early humans, and the biographer would quiz me nightly on my latest thoughts in regard to myHomo Primitivo, as if it were a creature I was keeping in my room. We now admired the Norwegian’s refusal of English, of Anglo-superdominance, like a monk’s rejection of intimate congress and a Luddite’s of looms. We accepted the journalist’s ritual invocation of Putin at dinner as one might an empty chair for Elijah. When the Charlemagne biographer suggested we each hold court with a story, and that it be not about the sickness, sadness and death that had afflicted this region, and instead a happy tale, we agreed. Tonight it was the Norwegian’s turn.

“My story is abouta man named Johan,” the Norwegian said in his language, and his wife repeated in English.
This was after dinner, which took place in a small room with an enormous table, its low ceiling greased and blackened by chimney smoke. The Norwegian told his story in fragments, to give his wife time to translate. As she spoke his words to us, he gazed off, introspective, his triangle of puffy gray hair aiming in two directions like divergent philosophies.
“I knew Johan through some university friends in Oslo. He had planned to move to Prague in the summer of 1993. Prague, then, attracted a certain type — people like Johan, college-educated layabouts without concrete aspirations who talked about wanting to ‘open a literary space’ or ‘start a magazine’ but mostly sat around feeling that life had little point. These types, which Johan perfectly illustrated, were moody and average-looking young men — and I should be an expert on them as I was one myself — depressives who lacked purpose but who, in the interim of locating one, slept late and read a lot of film criticism and French theory, and brooded over unobtainable women who burned into their field of vision. In failing to capture them, these unemployed men with a lot of free time felt greatly persecuted, which they took out on the somewhat homelier females who made themselves earnestly available.”
After translating this part, the wife and husband spoke in Norwegian to each other, as if working something out, about this story and what he would tell. We could see between them that he was the type he described, disgruntled, and with clumsy features, while the wife possessed that kind of beauty that seems like a form of cleverness, something she’s figured out that the rest of us haven’t.
“These men who didn’t know what to do with their lives, and only loved women who brutally ignored them, suffered from a general inertia they blamed on Oslo instead of themselves. Prague, and its opening to the West, the excitement of the Velvet Revolution, of cheap rent and a bohemian scene featuring superior and more obliging women, took on promise as a solution to poor character, to failure at life. Johan had a friend who was teaching at a film school there and invited him to come and stay. There was a going-away party that I myself attended, and then Johan took off for his new life. We were all a little begrudging. If he failed, we’d gloat. If he succeeded, maybe we, too, would move to Prague.
Johan arrived to that city’s airport on a cold and rainy Sunday morning. Nonresidents lined up, nothing out of the ordinary, Johan among them, excited for this new chapter, as the line inched forward to the rhythmic stamping of documents. When it was his turn to present his passport, the trouble began.
The immigration officer demanded to know why Johan’s passport was wrinkled, the photo water-damaged.
‘It’s still an official document,’ Johan explained to the officer, who remained as blank and steely as a military tank. ‘It’s just a bit worn because I spilled something on it a while back.’
At the other passport kiosks, stamps ka-junked and people sailed through, without interrogation or arguing, one after another, while Johan went in circles with the border agent.
Eventually he was taken to a small room with a reinforced door that was locked (he tried it), and left there for several hours. He began to understand, staring at the blank, reinforced door, that there was an iron fist under the velvet curtain, or however the expression went.
In the late afternoon, another man, as rude and dispassionate as the first, came in and asked him a series of questions. Johan answered and ‘tried not be a dick,’ as he later put it. He was left in the room again. It was evening before the same man came back and told Johan he would not be admitted to the country unless a representative from the Norwegian Consulate was willing to intervene and issue him a new passport. Johan was allowed to place a call to the consulate.One phone call,they said, as if he were guilty of something. Seeing as it was Sunday, the consulate was closed.
Johan was taken back to the long border-control hallway. The agent informed him he would remain there until the next day. If the consulate agreed to help him, he could gain entry. If not, they would force him onto a flight home.
It was late, and the hall was empty, the kiosks locked and dark. The other travelers had all gone on to unseen realities that Johan, trapped alone in this bleak interstice, envied. He sat in a chair. He was thirsty and had no water. He had no cigarettes. He was cold and had no jacket. He was trying to ‘lie down’ in the chair, his neck resting on the hard edge of the seat back, wondering if he could sleep this way, when he heard a loud bang.
At the other end of the hall was a young woman. She’d dropped a large red suitcase on the floor. Johan watched as she opened it and riffled through. She located cigarettes and lit one. Kneeling on the floor with the lit cigarette in her mouth, she proceeded to reorganize her suitcase, her busy movements those of someone free of worry, killing time. Periodically, she got up and paced around.
How did she have such energy? Johan had to focus his energy on his outrage at being detained.
She waved at him. He waved back. She walked down to his end of the hall and offered him a cigarette.
Up close, he saw that she was way beyond his league: in other words, exactly his type, this confident girl in tight jeans and white high-top Converses. Later, he held onto details. The jeans. The high tops.
‘Why do they keep you?’ she asked in stilted English.
‘They don’t like my passport,’ he said. ‘What about you?’
She smiled and said, ‘I guess you could say they don’t like my passport either.’
He asked where she was from. Her answer, the way she said the word, became another detail he held tight. ‘Yugoslavia.’
Johan understood it was possible she had no passport for them to like or dislike, just as there was no Yugoslavia. Not anymore.
She was trying to go to Abu Dhabi, she said. Johan nodded, unable to remember if that was the Emirates or Qatar or where. He saw oil sheikhs and girls like this one. He wanted to ask questions, but all he could think of wasWho are you,which you never ask, and no one can answer.
She went back to her end of the hall. He smoked the cigarette as if inhaling the mystery of this brazen, sexy girl. He was pondering going down to speak with her when border agents came into the hall and approached her. There was a discussion that Johan could not hear, the girl nodding, not saying much. She was escorted out, dragging her big red suitcase.
Johan slept badly, upright, in the uncomfortable chair. When he woke, it was dawn. Rain fell over the tarmac beyond the windows in cruel sheets.”

“Johan’s dealing with the consulate,and the period in which he bummed around Prague, is not of interest to our story. He was there for a while and then home. He continued to think of that night at passport control, of the girl and her brave and casual boredom. He graded himself an F in enduring a taste of repressive Soviet-style authority. An F for failing to learn more about the girl when he had his chance.
Back in Oslo, Johan was hired in the first wave of the dot-com industry, sold his stake in a ‘start-up’ — whatever that is — and made good money. He could afford to travel and avoid working for a while. He decided to go to Abu Dhabi, to try to find the girl.
He’d read about women from poor and war-ravaged countries who immigrated there by arrangement with bad people who forced the women into prostitution. Johan felt certain the girl he met had come deliberately, knowingly, to hustle in an oil-rich nation. She grew larger in his mind.
He spent two weeks searching, night after night, in the various hooker establishments of Abu Dhabi, neobrutalist hotels with loud, smoky mezzanines, as he scanned the faces of women who scanned him as a mark. He watched women exit elevators and click through hotel lobbies, or stand around in lounges, preening and alert. His conversations usually ended in misunderstanding; the women all thought he was looking for a type, not a specific actual person. Or they played games, tossed false leads. Sure, I know her. Blond, yes? She’ll be here later. Or, I’ll arrange a party and you can see her. Or, You’ll forget all about her, trust me.
Only once did the offer seem worth pursuing. A dark-haired woman with large eyes and a crooked nose spoke to Johan in a frank way that he read as believable. I know this girl you mean. She’s Croatian. Me, I’m Croatian. She came here around then, yes. I think she told me about that, some trouble when she arrived. Yes, she’s still here.
That night, he went to the small, dingy club where the girl with the crooked nose said to meet. She was there with another girl who was tall, and blond. Her hair wasn’t long as he recalled, but short and bleached almost white. He told her his story, that he’d seen a girl — maybe her — in the airport trying to enter Prague three years earlier.
‘I don’t remember you,’ she said. ‘But I think that was me.’
‘Did you have a giant red suitcase?’ he asked.
‘Yes, I did.’
It was her, and of course she would not remember him. She was not going to be weighted by sentimental memories of a dweeb like Johan. He remembered her, and that was enough.
For the next week, Johan saw her every night, and every night, he paid for her company. He had planned to demonstrate his interest, his sincerity, by insisting they merely talk, get to know each other, despite the money he was spending. But that was not how things went. She seemed to prefer the exchange of services that she was used to, and Johan went along with it, perhaps too easily. This caused him guilt and confusion. But after several days together in this stilted arrangement, something shifted. She turned to him, you could say. I still don’t understand it. It’s baffling, but she fell in love with Johan.”
There was a pause in the story while the Norwegian and his wife spoke in their language. The wife’s tone was corrective.
“She wants me to here acknowledge,” she translated for him, speaking of herself in the third person, “that no one understands why anyone falls in love. And that my surprise that she did fall in love, instead of use him, probably derives from a cheap stereotype that post-bloc Slavic women are cynical and calculating. My wife is right. I should not be surprised the girl had a heart, and that she could find something to love in Johan, even if I don’t. I’m a lot like him, as I said, and we are, in truth, adversaries to a degree. But let us continue.
This girl moved to Oslo with Johan. The first few months, for him anyhow — we can’t speak for her — were blissful. The person he’d fantasized about for three long years was funny and charming. His friends all liked her. She adapted easily, and even took it upon herself to learn Norwegian.
But as they settled into life together, doubt crept in for Johan. If he went out alone, she’d ask where he’d been. Occasionally, when they passed other women on the street, part of him peeled off, dreamed of strangers. One morning she turned to him in bed and her breath, morning rank, singed his nostrils like a moral failing. All he could do was hold his own breath.
He started to become annoyed when she didn’t know a particular band, a movie. Since he’d spent his early 20s slacking and absorbing culture while she was fleeing a failed state, he was impatient with her ignorance of what mattered to him.
She began to want sex with Johan more than he wanted it with her. That it was always available to him devalued it to a degree he’d never imagined possible. It was like walking through a room constantly filled with steaming piles of food and you really just want a break from food. He wanted a break from her.
He suggested she visit her mother, who lived in Zagreb. It was while she was away that he began to suspect she was not, perhaps had never been, the heroic creature in the airport with the white high tops. They don’t like my passport either. He was riven by nostalgia for that girl. Because this one, it wasn’t her. Even if it was her it wasn’t her. What he’d seen, wanted, extolled, was not the girl he’d found. She wasn’t heroic. She was normal, needy, imperfect. The relationship, as far as he was concerned, was over.
Johan was too cowardly to tell her in person. When she returned from her mother’s, he’d left her a note. He said he’d be gone a few days while she sorted out what to do and where to go. Johan took a train to Sweden. He sat in an ugly hotel bar with brash Swedes and drank flat, tasteless beer and felt depression spreading through his body. It was wintertime and bleak. The girl he’d dreamed of was nowhere to be found. This plunged him into existential crisis. He stared out the window at the heavy sky and bare trees, which had tattered plastic bags caught in their branches.”

The Norwegian sighed audiblyand looked around the table, as if for a reaction. His wife was also quiet.
We were all confused. This was it?
“But, but but,” the Charlemagne biographer said, “what about a happy ending? That was the rule.”
“It is a happy ending,” the Norwegian said in his language, and his wife repeated in ours.
“Of sad Johan drinking flat beer in a tacky bar, loveless and alone?”
“The story is happy for me,” the Norwegian said, “not for Johan.”
“Oh? And why is that?”
“Because I married the woman he was looking for. And she is telling you this story now.”
We all looked at his wife.
“My husband has had his fun,” she said, and mussed his hair, but lovingly. “And tomorrow I will have mine, as it will be my turn.”
And with that, we said good night.
The girlWith theBig RedsuItcase
By
Rachel Kushner
A short story from The New York Times Magazine’s Decameron Project.
Up close, he saw that she was way beyond his league: in other words, exactly his type.
Illustration byAbang
Spot illustrations and lettering bySophy Hollington
—
Rachel Kushneris the author of the novels “Telex from Cuba,” “The Flamethrowers” and “The Mars Room.” A book of essays, “The Hard Crowd,” will be published next spring.
Abangis a visual artist based in Seoul, South Korea. Her recent work has focused on spatial direction, portraits and sculptures.
Sophy Hollingtonis a British artist and illustrator. She is known for her use of relief prints, created using the process of the linocut and inspired by meteoric folklore as well as alchemical symbolism.
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Credits
Additional design and development byShannon LinandJacky Myint.
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