A Replacement Life

by Boris Fishman

  “Hey, you still speak-a Italiano?” she said.

  The words, long unused, floated up like a dog. “Dove la fermata dell’ autobus?” he said. She started to laugh, but it made her cry again. “I went there last year,” she said when she recovered. “On vacation.”

  “To Ladispoli?” he asked. He had come to think of it as a place that had ceased to exist after the Gelmans departed.

  “No. Firenze, Venezia. It was pretty. Personally, though? You could fly to Vegas for, like, half the money and half the time.”

  “Vegas?” he said.

  “The Bellagio?” she said. “The Venetian? I mean, it’s like a guy in one of those boats, and he’s pushing you, and he can sing if you pay him. Exactly like in Venice. In Italian or English, whichever language you prefer. Why do you need Venice? It stinks there, by the way.”

  “I see,” he said.

  “I get a little crazy when I go to Vegas,” she said, dabbing again at the corners of her eyes. “Hella fun. You go?”

  Recently, Slava had fished out of the Las Vegas Sun an item for “The Hoot,” the humor column that was his official responsibility at Century, but he didn’t think he could explain all that to Vera. He shook his head.

  “You got to go,” she summed up. “I have to go clean up, I can’t stand in front of you like this. But listen: You have to come over.”

  He blinked. “Why?”

  “This fight they’re having?” She pointed at the living room. “It’s crazy. How many years now?”

  “So how come you came tonight?” Slava said.

  “Because my grandpa said he’s going, he don’t give a bleep what my mom says. So she said I have to go with him, because it looks bad if he goes alone, like nobody loves him. But she said not to talk to anyone. Be, like, quiet and pissed off. It’s nice to see you, though, Slava.”

  “It’s nice to see you, too,” he said.

  “The children have to fix it, like always. You come over for dinner, and little by little. You know?”

  “I don’t know,” he said carefully. “It’s their business.” He didn’t want to get involved with their argument. But with Vera?

  She shrugged. “There’s not many of us here. We have to stick together.”

  She stepped forward and placed her lips, full and soft, on his cheek. He felt the rasp of his cheeks prick whatever she had applied to her own. When she pulled back, the beige powder scattered finely between them. Then she walked out of the kitchen.

  When he heard the bathroom door close, he wandered into the hallway separating it from the kitchen and stood there, not eavesdropping. She was humming. Then she flushed and the water slithered down the pipes. He sprang back just before the door opened. Her face had returned to its prior immobility. She winked at him and walked past.

  The bathroom swam with the subtle sugar of Vera’s perfume. Berta had lined the wall with guest towels, hers and Grandfather’s concealed from foreign hands. Slava looked at the mirror. How many times had Grandmother’s withered face appeared in the exact spot where he now held his own? Slava knew that mirrors were covered after a Jewish death to prevent vanity. But what kind of mourning was it if you had to trick yourself into it? And was it so wrong to leave the mirror uncovered if it made Slava think of her? Wasn’t that the point? He lifted a towel from one of the hooks and slipped it over the mirror, fastening its edges with two containers of Berta’s face cream. He waited for this to have some effect, but he didn’t feel anything. He flushed the toilet in case someone was waiting. Despite himself, he hoped to find Vera standing outside the bathroom.

  Instead, he found Grandfather, looking lost. “Slavchik,” Grandfather said drowsily. His hands hung at his sides like a soldier’s, only that his shoulders sagged.

  “People are leaving?” Slava said.

  “No, no,” Grandfather said.

  “You got lucky with Berta,” Slava said.

  “She’s good,” Grandfather said agnostically. “I read in the newspaper about a home nurse from Ukraine who lived with this old couple for five years. Our people, from Riga. They were like family with her—they took her on their vacations. When it was time for her to go back to Ukraine, she said to them: ‘I hope you kikes rot in hell.’ So you never know.”

  Slava made himself embrace Grandfather.

  “Something I need you to look at,” Grandfather said, pointing to the bedroom.

  “We’re both tired. Let’s do it another day,” Slava said, wanting to return to the living room.

  “Another day with you?” Grandfather said. “Another day with you is a year from now. The deadline is soon. It’ll take only a moment.”

  Grandfather strode toward the bedroom but stopped at the threshold. Slava followed his gaze to the bed, the largest thing in the room. The biggest and softest, Grandfather had insisted to Marat on Avenue Z, and here it was. You could look nowhere else. Now that one had to sleep in it alone, it was grotesque.

  “Her slippers are right there, but she’s not,” Grandfather said. “What sense does that make?”

  Slava put his arm around Grandfather’s shoulder and brought the silk of the old man’s head to his chest.

  “This day has no end,” Grandfather said. “They’re talking out there, but I can’t understand a word they’re saying.”

  Slava rubbed his nose in Grandfather’s hair, soft and straight as goose down, the hair of someone a third his age. The old man nodded helplessly, a fat, lazy tear at his eye. Finally, he stepped into the bedroom and hooked a papery finger into the handle of a bureau, removing a straw pouch where he stuffed mail until Slava’s mother came to translate. She came all the time. The item he wanted was out front, backed by circulars and forms. He sat down in the chair next to the bed, eyeing its satin slipcover like an untouchable object. “Look, please,” he said, extending the envelope.

  Slava pulled out the roughly folded papers and inspected the lettering. He snagged on the Hebrew, blocky but lissome. Then he saw the English and whistled slightly. He had heard people in the office talking about it. “‘Dear you,’” he translated. “‘The Conference on Material Claims Against Germany’ . . .”

  “I know what it says,” Grandfather said. “Mama translated. If you were a Holocaust victim, tell the story and you get funds. They’re saying—depending on what you went through—a bigger piece once or a smaller piece every month for the rest of your life. I did it on the calculator: If you make it ten months, you come out ahead.”

  “Who’s saying?”

  “People at the Jewish Center. On Kings Highway.”

  “Why do you listen to them?” Slava said. “It’s a gossip mill.”

  “Who else for me to listen to?”

  The last page in the packet was blank except for a heading: “NARRATIVE. Please describe, in as much detail as you can, where the Subject was during the years 1939 to 1945.”

  “How do they know who to send it to?” Slava asked, looking at Grandmother’s name in the address bar.

  “Grandmother’s registered in that museum in Israel. Vashi Yashi.”

  “Yad Vashem,” Slava said. “Say it correctly.”

  “Day Vashem.”

  “Yad Vashem. It’s not hard—say it.”

  He glared and pronounced correctly.

  “Sixty years they had,” Slava said, “they do it the moment she dies.”

  “Well.” Grandfather hung his head.

  They investigated the window, South Brooklyn steaming in the dense July night. A clothesline strung with large underthings wavered in the breeze.

  “So,” Grandfather said, turning to face Slava. “Can you write something?”

  Slava nearly laughed. This was Grandfather—the rules were right there, but he was going to ask anyway.

  “She . . .” Slava searched for the word. Gone? Wasn’t? They hadn’t come to an acceptable word yet.

  “Not about Grandmother,” Grandfather said.

  “About whom, then?”

  “About me.”

>   Now Slava laughed. “I don’t think they’re giving out restitution for evacuations to Uzbekistan.”

  Grandfather poked the paper with a square nail. “They are, but it’s dicey. Some yes, some no. Either way, it’s less money. But ghettos and concentration camps, it’s a green path all the way. So, give me one of those. You’re a writer, aren’t you?”

  Slava opened his hands. “Now I’m a writer.”

  “You write for the newspaper where you work,” he said. “That’s what you said.”

  “It’s a magazine,” Slava said.

  “So, this is like an article for your newspaper.”

  “Articles for my newspaper are not invented.”

  “This country does not invent things?” Grandfather said, his eyes flashing. “Bush did not invent a reason to cut off Saddam’s balls? When the stocks fall down, it’s not because someone invented the numbers?”

  “This country has nothing to do with it!”

  “You don’t know how to do it. Is that it?”

  “I do know how to do it,” Slava said through his teeth.

  “Then do it,” Grandfather said. “For your grandmother. Do it.”

  There was a knock on the door. Slava’s mother’s head—round, defenseless—sneaked in. “Everything okay here, boys?” she said.

  “Okay, daughter,” Grandfather said with a strange formality.

  “There’s some dessert on the table,” she said. “I think people will start to go soon.”

  “We will, we will,” Grandfather said.

  “I ordered the gravestones,” she said. “They go up in a week.”

  “Mine?” Grandfather said.

  “Will be blank. There’s a plinth connecting them. Says Gelman. Your stone is black, Mama’s is lighter.”

  “The inscription?”

  “In Russian. ‘Don’t speak of them with grief: They are with us no more. But with gratitude: They were.’ A poem—Grusheff suggested it.”

  “Grusheff drank tea with Pushkin, if you believe what he says,” Grandfather said. “He probably wrote it himself. We should make sure there are no other stones with those lines. The words are nice, though.”

  “I’ll check, Papa,” Slava’s mother said and gently closed the door.

  Grandfather turned to Slava. “I need to remind you that your great-uncle Aaron—my brother—is in a mass grave in Latvia? Unkissed, he died. I wish you could read his letters, they weren’t in Yiddish. I went after him with a butcher knife when they called him up. A pinkie would have been enough to disqualify him. In ’41, at least. My year? Every boy conscripted in ’43”—he sliced his palm through the air—“cut down like grass.” He leaned in and whispered, “I wasn’t going to volunteer to be cannon fodder. You wouldn’t be here. I stayed alive.”

  “What does Aaron have to do with it?” Slava said. “Look. It says: ‘Ghettos, forced labor, concentration camps . . . What did the subject suffer between 1939 to 1945?’ The subject. Not you. You didn’t suffer.”

  “I didn’t suffer?” Grandfather’s eyes sparkled. “I’ve got a grave already, I didn’t suffer. God bless you, you know that?” He snorted, as if he’d been asked to sell a perfectly healthy horse at half value. “All the men were taken right away: Aaron, Father, all the cousins. Father was too old for infantry, so they took him to Heavy Labor. Two years later, there’s a knock at the door. I see this skeleton in rags, so I shout to my mother, ‘There’s a beggar at the door, give him some food!’ Not a strange sight in those days. And he starts weeping. It was Father. A week later, they told us about Aaron. Killed by artillery. I wanted to spare my mother losing the last of her men, so yes, I went to Uzbekistan. Not to live in a palace—to pick pockets and piss myself on the street so they’d think I was a retard and not draft me.” He looked away. “Look, I came back. I enlisted.”

  “On a ship in liberated territory,” Slava said. “Look, I didn’t make up the rules. The paper says: ‘Ghettos, forced labor, concentration camps.’”

  “What are you, Lenin’s grandson?” Grandfather said. “Maybe I didn’t suffer in the exact way I need to have suffered”—he flicked a finger at the envelope—“but they made sure to kill all the people who did. We had our whole world taken out from under us. No more dances, no holidays, no meals with your mother at the stove. A meal like this?” He pointed at the living room. “Do you know what it means to have a meal like this? Do you know what we came back to after the war? Tomatoes the size of your head. They’d fertilized them with human ash. You follow?”

  “So now you want your revenge,” Slava said. “Heist the German government.”

  “The German government?” he said. “The German government should be grateful to get off this easy.”

  “This German government didn’t kill anyone.”

  “So, everyone, we should say thank you?” Grandfather slapped his hands, the pop rising to the ceiling.

  “What is it?” Slava said. “Do you need more money?” He pointed around them: the bureau, the bed, the tricked-out torchieres keeping sentry in the corners.

  “Money?” Grandfather said, drawing back. “Money makes the world go round. Money’s not the only reason, but I don’t know anyone who’s been hurt by money.”

  “Why did you never tell me any of that before? About evacuation?”

  “We didn’t want those ugly things in your head. We wanted you above us. Enough hands had to go in the dirt so yours wouldn’t have to.”

  “So this is a rose you’re asking me to smell?”

  “It’s family, Slavik.”

  “Let’s skip the big words, if you don’t mind. I’m not Kozlovich. It’s crime. That’s our family? Do you know what the punishment is if we’re caught?”

  “I would give my right arm for you if that’s what it took. That’s family.”

  “If that’s what what took?”

  “You—safe. You—happy.” Grandfather slapped the nightstand between them. “This conversation is over. I don’t need your services.”

  “I don’t need your right arm!”

  They sat in bitter silence, listening to the muted chatter carrying from the living room. Slava savored his power over Grandfather, like an olive you keep sucking to get every thread of the meat.

  Now he was a writer. Who was responsible for this deviancy in the first place? In America, unlike back home, the mail came down like a blizzard. The adults hauled it upstairs with dark faces. Was this a letter from James Baker III alerting the Gelmans that a tragic mistake had been made and the family would have to return to the Soviet Union? They couldn’t read it.

  The letter was given to Slava. His fingers were small enough for the Bible font and onionskin pages of the brick dictionary they had procured from a curbside, somebody who had learned English already. As the adults shifted their feet, leaning against doorjambs and working their lips with their teeth, he carefully sliced open the envelope and unfolded the letter inside, his heart beating madly. He was all that stood between his family and expulsion by James Baker III. America was a country where you could have Roman numerals after your name, like a Caesar.

  As the adults watched, Slava checked the unfamiliar words in the bricktionary. “Annual percentage rate.” “Layaway.” “Installment plan.” “One time only.” “For special customers like you.” The senior Gelmans waiting, Slava was embarrassed to discover himself mindlessly glued to certain words in the dictionary that had nothing to do with the task at hand. On the way to “credit card,” he had snagged on “cathedral,” its spires—t, h, d, l—like the ones the Gelmans had seen in Vienna. “Rebate” took him to “roly-poly,” which rolled around his mouth like a fat marble. “Venture rewards” led him to “zaftig,” a Russian baba’s breasts covering his eyes as she placed in front of him a bowl of morning farina. Eventually, he managed to verify enough to reassure the adults that, no, it didn’t seem like a letter from James Baker III. The senior Gelmans sighed, shook their heads, resumed frying fish.

  Slava remained with th
e bricktionary. Hinky, lunker, wattles. Taro, terrazzo, toodle-oo. “Levity” became a Jewish word because Levy was a Jewish surname in America. “Had had”—knock-knock—was a door. A “gewgaw” was a “gimcrack,” and a “gimcrack” was “folderol.” “Sententious” could mean two opposite things, and wasn’t to be confused with “senescent,” “tendentious,” or “sentient.” Nor “eschatological” with “scatological.” This language placed the end of the world two letters away from the end of a bowel movement.

  Russian words were as stretchy as the meat under Grandmother’s arm. You could invent new endings and they still made sense. Like peasants fidgeting with their ties at a wedding, the words wanted to unlace into diminutives: Mikhail into Mishen’ka (little Misha), kartoshka into kartoshechka (little potato). English was colder, clipped, a brain game. But English was brilliant. For some reason, in the bedroom, all this gave him skin against Grandfather.

  Grandfather grunted and, avoiding Slava’s eyes, rose. Downstairs, a salsa had started up, the dull bass making the same point over and over. Moving toward the door, Grandfather shuddered and lost his stride, reaching out his arms as if he were going to slip. But seeing no help rushing from his grandson, he got his hand on the bureau, righted himself, and walked out.

  –3–

  The east-facing wall of the Spartak Dance Club was not, strictly speaking, any longer a wall. Three quarters of Minsk had been bombed into rubble, which explains why it’s so ugly today, rebuilt after the war in the socialist style. But even before victory was declared over the Germans, the Saturday-night dances at the Spartak Dance Club had resumed. The people needed dances as much as bread, Stalin had said. The entire country rushed to reopen its dance halls, those villages without one scrounging to convert something, anything, that could hold a gramophone and a dance platform. Two months after V-E Day, the Spartak Dance Club in Minsk was back in regular operation despite remaining in possession of only three walls, which meant that Sofia Dreitser’s older sister Galina wouldn’t be attending the Saturday-night dances because, in her view, the other walls could go crumbling at any moment, and then that would be a pretty costly dance, wouldn’t it.