A Door Behind A Door by Yelena Moskovich
Review by Trahearne Falvey
Yelena Moskovich’s third novel A Door Behind A Door sees the performance artist and writer continuing with her experimental exploration of the Soviet diasporic psyche, and centres around Olga, who fled the Soviet Union with her family as a child and now lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Though Olga works temp jobs and experiences periods of unemployment, her life has the semblance of stability: she lives with Angelina, a nurse, and the couple, we are told, ‘love each other deeply and also daily and also toward the horizon’. The centre cannot hold, though: a phone call promising information about Olga’s estranged brother Misha (or Moshe) leads to her past crashing back, and sends the novel spinning into a Lynchian world of shady diners, prisons and strip malls, in which East and West, death and sex, are always two sides of the same nickel. In striking prose, the propulsive rhythms of which draw as much from poetry as the crime thriller, Moskovich stages the violent shattering of voice, identity and conventional narrative sense that accompanies being forced from one’s home. ‘My life, split in two,’ she writes.
I am an American citizen,’ Olga asserts, with a ‘good American accent’. This is the difference between her and Nikolai, the voice on the other end of the phone. A former neighbour in the Soviet Union who stabbed an old woman ‘once, twice, thrice’, Olga calls him ‘part of the old world’ and tries to repress her un-American past by not mentioning the phone calls to Angelina. Ironically, though, to meet Nikolai she must go into that most American of spaces, the diner, where it’s all grilled cheeses, chocolate chip pancakes and coffee with creamer, and she finds him dressed in a Soviet jacket and an American baseball cap. ‘To get to Hell,’ he says in a low voice, ‘they take you through America. There is a door behind a door.’ Moskovich suggests that there is no easy distinction to be made between the old world and the new — Nikolai is also Nicky (and also, possibly, a dog with fingers named Vaska); Sally, a customer at the diner who dips her fries into strawberry milkshake, is also Oksana, or Crazy Mama; Tanya, a teenage girl Olga shares a prison cell with, is both alive and dead. This constant doubling evokes the schizophrenic world of the migrant, who is never fully one person in one place at one time. In Moskovich’s world, history and geography overlap, echo and infect each other.
This takes its most potent form in Olga’s brother. Olga’s family, like Moskovich’s, left Ukraine for the US as Jewish refugees and Misha, forced to renounce or forget his Jewishness, decides to ‘get Jewish’ again (as Olga phrases it) in America. He loses an eye in a violent encounter with the neighbourhood bully, and flickers through the novel as a revenant, avenging figure, wielding a knife and correcting people on his name: ‘It’s Moshe,’ he says, ‘It’s Moshe,’ and then, ‘It’s Misha.’ There’s something deeply affecting witnessing this young boy simultaneously pushing and pulling at his past, trying to fumble towards something stable that is his. Jewishness, Moskovich suggests, is always, at the same time, not-Jewishness.
Misha/Moshe, Nicky/Nikolai and the others that crash around inside Moskovich’s novel are not characters so much as rhythms, pulsing through the fractured narrative in different guises. That something so weird is also so compelling, so very readable, is a triumph, and has a lot to do with Moskovich’s use of form. The novel is built from subtitle-and-paragraph fragments, which at times imitate a screenplay and at others a long-form poem. The interplay between heading and content contributes to the novel’s theme of duality and allows for both moments of isolated beauty:
“THIS LOVE
When I sleep, I dream of waves, sparkling waves, that burn, burn, burn with the same voice.
- and thrilling twists in pace:
NOW, NOW
‘Now, now, now,’ Tanya says.
NOW?
I’m struggling to breathe.
WELL NOW
‘So you think just cause your brother’s a psycho, that makes you a tough cunt, huh?’
NO
I’m grabbing my neck.”
Moskovich has drawn comparisons with Sophie Calle, Clarice Lispector, even Lana del Rey, but for me the writer that came to mind was Kathy Acker, not only because of the use of disjunction and capitalised headings, but because of the centring of female sexual pleasure. In a violent and uncertain world, there is joy and release to be found in the erotic — a teenage game of spin the bottle, or a snog through the bars of a prison. Unlike Acker, though, Moskovich’s experimental choices never feel self-consciously provocative, always make sense. A Door Behind a Door may disorient readers who prefer more conventional narrative structures, or disappoint those looking for satisfying resolutions, but it is a thrilling, intoxicating ride.