A Replacement Life

by Boris Fishman

  “Can you blame him?” he went on. “You think he had plans to leave Minsk in 1941? No, he ran from the Germans. Then he came back and was a Jew under the Soviets for forty-five years, which is to say a lower life-form. Then America. Here you’re not a Jew anymore. Here you’re an immigrant. Go back where you came from, Commie. You don’t think he’s due?” The rehearsal of Grandfather’s arguments came with wondrous facility to Slava. He rested his hand on his forehead contemplatively, to see how it felt.

  “I want to tell you a story,” Arianna said carefully. “There was a Soviet family that was settled near us. We’d sponsored them, actually. I had been pen pals with the son before they were released—you know the story. And so Mother Bock says, ‘Harry, get them memberships in the synagogue.’ And my father, he’s not as quick as my mother, but then he will surprise you. And so he says: ‘I don’t think that’s for them, Sandy.’ Meaning, they’re not religious. And Sandra says, ‘How will they ever become religious unless people like us—’ and so on and so forth. Harry, as always, in the end, he does what Sandra says, and he gets them synagogue memberships. One hundred fifty a person, times three, and this was fifteen years ago. Also, the synagogue has limited seats, he had to talk to the registrar, get special permission. But we don’t see them—the Rubins, they were called. Instead, we see another family, also three—Americans. They get to chatting with my parents, it’s Friday-night services, everyone has a couple of shots. And they tell them this Russian family sold them the memberships. Sandra—you should have seen her face. After all the lifts, that face doesn’t really telegraph emotion, but at that moment she could have been in the opera. She kept her mouth shut only because she was mortified. Harry just chuckled to himself. She wanted to call the police! And he said, ‘Just let them be. Think about what they’ve been through. Give it thirty years, then they’ll ask for it.’”

  “Exquisite magnanimity.”

  “Slava, I’m on your side.”

  “Why do you call your parents by their first names?”

  “I don’t know, that’s how it’s always been. I don’t always.”

  “Your father bent the rules himself—he got a special favor from the registrar.”

  “Are you really going to compare?” she said. “It was for a good cause.”

  “Who gets to decide what’s a good cause? You said it: a thirty-year dispensation. Let the savages lie a bit to the Germans.”

  She placed her palm on his forearm. “You can’t.”

  “You’re full of instructions.”

  She turned away.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “This isn’t me. This is—”

  “I know.”

  She knew. There was nothing he could say that she didn’t already know. His irritation wouldn’t abate, but he forced himself to ignore it. “Are your grandparents still alive?” he said.

  “Just my grandmother,” she indulged his effort. “Ninety-four young. Swims every morning, e-mails Zen declarations.”

  “For instance.”

  She brightened. “‘Hi my doll Ari.’ That’s what she calls me. ‘I am finally too old to give a crap what anyone thinks. I wish I’d gotten here fifty years sooner.’ And then the next day, ‘Ari, doll, do you think a ninety-four-year-old woman can’t shake her hips? Yes, she can.’ My grandfather’s gone, all her friends are gone, and all of a sudden she likes a sip of Maker’s and then to the jukebox. Do you know that poem: ‘On the way we passed a long row of elms. She looked at them awhile out of the ambulance window and said, What are all those fuzzy-looking things out there? Trees? Well, I’m tired of them and rolled her head away.’ My God, I am just rambling.”

  “Did you cover the mirror when your grandfather died?”

  She shrugged. “I was five. I had a dance recital that weekend, so I was doing pirouettes like a loon. I was so sad all the mirrors were covered. I’m named after his father. Ariel. You?”

  “I don’t know,” Slava said. “Slava means ‘glory.’ Or ‘fame.’ Depending on what you mean. I covered a mirror. I didn’t feel anything.”

  “It’s like weed—you don’t feel anything the first couple of times,” she laughed, ushering stridency out of the conversation. This time he went along. “A shiva lasts for a week,” she went on. “You keep the mirrors covered. Then you see what you feel.”

  “I see,” he said.

  “Or not,” she said. “You take on too much, so it’s too much, and then you want none of it. You’d rather do nothing than have to do all that. But you can choose your own amount.”

  “I would like to teach you something as well,” he said.

  “Please,” she said.

  “I meant I also would like to find something to teach you.”

  “I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t think you could.”

  “You’re just doing a favor for a colleague.”

  “If you think so, Slava, you’re not as smart as I hoped. But finally, yes, I dragged you out. It was easier to get hired by Century.”

  A slurry smile appeared on his face. “The upside of professional mortification. Why me?”

  “You’re not like the others.”

  “That’s a foolproof fact.”

  “What do you want, Slava?” she said. “You want to publish in Century so badly?”

  “I guess not,” he said. “I remember the first time I saw it. I was just killing time in the library. A lot of time killing time in the library at Hunter. I’d gone through half the magazines in the periodical rack. And then Century. There was a piece about a rape in South Africa, and Sheila”—Sheila Garbanes (pert, tart, groovy) was a staff writer—“had a piece on these two philosophers at the University of Chicago. Ask me if I knew the first thing about philosophy, but I read the whole thing.”

  “God, I read the same issue,” she said.

  “Arch—”

  “On the farmers. The father farms organic and the son farms industrial,” she said. “Imagine if we were reading it at the same time, fifty blocks apart.”

  “I want to write something people will read,” he said. “And say, There goes the fellow who wrote that.”

  “So do that,” she said. “Wake up tomorrow and write something new. And send it somewhere else. Not Century. Some other place. Are you listening? Look at me.”

  “I will,” he said, straightening.

  “And another thing,” she said. “You don’t think about this anymore between now and then. It can’t help you.”

  “Okay,” he said.

  “And then the third thing.”

  “Yes.” He tried to focus the glaze out of his eyes.

  “Take me home.”

  In the taxi, he ripped the sleeve of the Balenciaga from her shoulder. He sprang back, remembering Skinny Jeans’s valuation, but she shrugged it away. Her tongue was cool and thick, her breath smoky and clean despite everything they had been drinking. They bit each other’s lips, breathing each other in. He imagined the air spread to every corner of her, down to the dead fingertip, where it stopped.

  At the wheel, Hamid Abdul was trying not to watch them. Hamid, his immigrant brother. How Slava was exceeding his immigrant brief with this fine-skinned American specimen. See Slava take the milk of this American skin into his mouth, Hamid. Look at her fingers disappear from your rearview mirror. We are miscegenating with the natives, Hamid, we are assimilating, are we not?

  Irvin the doorman did not share Hamid’s interest in Slava’s quarry. He wanted only Slava’s “John Handcocks” for a pair of slacks from dry cleaning. Slava told him that he was going to buy some skinny jeans and be done with this slacks business. “It is absolute,” Irvin nodded obediently.

  “What a funny blanket,” Arianna said when they got into the apartment, eyeing the rhombus-shaped opening of the duvet cover. Slava stopped in the doorway to the bathroom. “It’s old,” he said before heading inside.

  When he emerged, she was asleep on his clean sheets in her street clothes, the knobs of her knees frowning behind the f
abric. He shed the lights, leaving only the desk lamp that had craned above so many drafts. Arianna slept guilelessly, her unnerving alertness finally stilled. He wondered what his grandmother had looked like at the moment she’d drawn her last breath. Had she been aware of it or lost in delirium? Had she been in pain or the opposite of pain? Was she talking now with her dead mother and father and grandfather? Hello, after all this time. It’s you. Where to begin? Let me tell you about everyone who showed up after you left: Zhenya, and the dance hall, and Zhenya, and prison, and Zhenya, and Tanya, and Edik, and tiny Slava, and Crimea, and the car accident, and then America, but first Italy, those fat grapes, the sea—I never learned how to swim!—and then, yes, America . . . He stopped himself. Her memories were his memories. But what were her memories?

  He sat staring at the telephone for a long time. It was late, too late to call, but he lifted the cordless anyway, stepping into the bathroom to avoid waking Arianna. Sure, Arianna, he would write something else.

  “What’s wrong?” Grandfather said. “What happened?”

  “I’m sorry to call so late. You were asleep?”

  “What is it?”

  “Tell me about Grandmother in the ghetto,” Slava said.

  Grandfather was silent, trying to understand. “I don’t know,” he said. “Why are you asking?”

  “You wanted me to do something. So I’m asking about her.”

  “Oh,” Grandfather said, startled. “But it would be about me.”

  “I can’t very well write about what Uzbekistan was like. Think.”

  “Oh,” Grandfather said. “I get it. She didn’t like to talk about it.”

  “To either of us,” Slava said.

  “Well.”

  “Well.”

  “I don’t know what you want me to say.”

  Slava was too tired to talk. Drunkenness had left him, as if he were an inhospitable host. Only weariness remained. It was a special kind of weariness that descended rarely, according to internal chemical regimens he did not understand. It made striving difficult, but also falsehood.

  “She was in the ghetto,” Grandfather said at last. “She escaped. She weighed nothing—the partisans lived on potato peels in the woods. They waded through swamps for so long her skin came off with the boots. They had her run a herd of cows.”

  “Cows?” Slava said.

  “Cows. I don’t know.”

  “What else?”

  “What else. She watched a woman in a bunker choke her child to death. There were fascists upstairs. The baby was crying, giving everyone away.” He summed up: “It’s not pleasant.”

  Slava cleared his throat. “What about her parents?”

  “Her father asked her to come back to the ghetto and get them, but her mother said no. ‘Get out, find your sister, don’t come back.’ Her sister had slipped out already. Imagine leaving your parents and they’re killed a month later.” He paused. “That’s all I know. She didn’t want to talk about it.”

  They were quiet for a minute. “Don’t tell a single soul,” Slava said.

  “Who would I tell?” he said.

  “Swear,” Slava said.

  Grandfather swore.

  “Family,” Slava said bitterly.

  “Ho, listen. I called a couple of stores—nobody has this Sancher. How far do you want me to go?”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Slava said.

  “No, I’ll get it for you.”

  “Don’t worry,” Slava said, and hung up.

  Cows. What would partisans, who had to hide and move often, want with cows? Milk, obviously. Did they slaughter them for food? But why would they have put a fifteen-year-old city girl in charge of a herd of cows? Punishment? Even anti-fascist partisans had no special fondness for Jews.

  What else did she do during those days and nights, the weather growing cold, the breastplate of the sky turning a bruised black under its necklace of stars? Night watch. (Why not.) Yes, he kept going: During the days, she tended cows, and at night, she kept watch for the camp. “Take pity on a young girl,” Slava imagined an older man who knew her from the neighborhood appealing to Zelkin, the commander. Zelkin spat: “You think there are such things as children and adults in a war?” He was respected because he did not take advantage of the young girls the way some commanders did, so the neighborhood man said nothing further.

  Slava emerged from the bathroom and was momentarily shocked to rediscover Arianna Bock in his bed. The last two days had brought oddity into his life. “They waded through swamps for so long her skin came off with her boots,” he said to Arianna’s gently rising and falling form. “She ate potato peels. Her first normal meal, she threw up. She ate so fast, shoveling it into her mouth, she threw up.”

  Arianna didn’t answer. He nodded and moved off toward his desk. He switched on his laptop and shifted the desk light away from Arianna. She released a startled snore and went back to soundless sleep.

  Cows, cows, cows. Now his grandmother would talk to him. Now it was no imposition. Now he would follow the movements of her mouth. Now he would embrace her and not let go until he could speak as her, until they became the same person.

  Sofia Dreitser, fifteen, originally of Karastoyanova Street #45, then, after being penned in the ghetto, of Vitebskaya #111, now of camouflaged zemlyanka #6 if you were counting from the bent birch with the bark like split skin. Not that she used the zemlyanka overmuch. During the day, she looked after the cows, her thumbs rigid from pulling on teats and her flanks bruised from the anemic knocks of their hooves, and then she sat up on the outskirts of camp in the crisp night, shivering under someone’s threadbare greatcoat, by her side a carbine she would not have known how to use. She slept for an hour or two in the morning after she was relieved, her dreams full of her father, who delivered goods by horse cart before the war, galloping in the dream with enormous blocks of ice, faster and faster, because the ice was melting in the hot air of the morning. Her free day was Sunday. She slept all day.

  One afternoon, several sleepless nights behind her, she nodded off while the cows were grazing a kilometer from camp . . .

  “NARRATIVE. Please describe, in as much detail as you can, where the Subject was during the years 1939 to 1945.”

  . . . I thought I had been asleep for a minute, but when I awoke, the sun had traveled half the arc of the sky. The animals were gone.

  One of the partisans, a Belarusian named Piotrus, said that because I’d lost the cows, I should be killed. One less mouth to feed, what with no cows to supply the grub. Piotrus was a pariah in Khutorka, his village, because he had gone with the partisans. Most of the Belarusians, who had been thrown around by the Russians and Poles for as long as anyone could remember, were only too happy to take up with the Germans. But Piotrus was old enough to have watched Russian limbs split off by German machine guns in the First World War. So he went with the partisans. To the villagers, he became a Jew lover, because the partisans sometimes took in Jewish fighters. Piotrus couldn’t even come back for a meal at his mother’s. So he spent all his time thinking of ways to restore his credentials as an anti-Semite.

  In our unit we had never had to kill one of our own. We had ambushed a German provisions truck once, the front tires busted by the tines of a pitchfork Livshitz had spent half the night burying in the dead earth. And we had executed a Belarusian collaborator. He was slurping his tea, a sugar cube still in his teeth as he crashed to the floor, his parents observing the scene with gloomy resignation. But never one of our own.

  Zelkin (the commander), Piotrus, and several others were conferring inside the small tent where Avdosya baked bread. I had been placed in a makeshift jail. Tsadik, one of the children we got after the Nazis scattered the Minsk orphanage, was listening in and reporting back to me. Bullets were precious, so the idea of a shooting was dismissed. To build a gallows in the middle of the forest when we might have to move at any moment seemed absurd.

  As they sat there and pounded moonshine we had taken from the B
elarusian collaborator, there was a distant mooing. They were coming back on their own! I leaped from my seat; Piotrus ran out of his tent, squinting. (He fancied himself a big shooter and was always taking aim at things, even a piece of bread before tearing into it.) And then, behind the sluggish mooing of the cows, there was that terrifying sound. It chopped through the air, then stretched like a string of sap. German.

  In that moment, stupidly, I couldn’t help thinking how much like our Yiddish it sounded. I hadn’t spoken a word of it since the night I had slipped out of the ghetto. Suddenly—what a stupid thought when your life is about to end—I missed it terribly. Fargideynk di veg, my father had said before I left. Remember the way. “Come back for us. We’re young yet, we can work. We can be useful.” For the first time in my memory, my mother interrupted him. “You go and never come back. Find your sister, stay together. I don’t want to see you here again.” She was trying so hard to look stern, and I didn’t argue because I didn’t want to embarrass her.

  The Minsk ghetto was liquidated one month later. “Liquidated”—what a strange word. It makes me think of a deluge, waters rushing in a stream, clear and cleansing. Every last person was killed. To this day, I can’t remember my mother’s face clearly. My father’s face, I can remember every crease and warp. My mother’s face is a blank.

  The Germans sounded as if they were a hundred meters away. Two of our scouts burst into the clearing where we had made camp, gesturing wildly in the familiar code. Someone pulled the levers out of the contraption that maintained the campfire over a gravelike vault. Several boys got their bodies behind a mound of earth and pushed it into the fire like horses leading the plow. Women were frantically tearing down the wash. In minutes, our entire crew was underground, the zemlyankas innocent under beds of birch leaves. The Germans, following the cows, passed wide of the clearing. That legend about cows knowing their way home is a bluff. Eventually, there was gunfire and objections from the animals. The blood was jumping out of my heart. Tsadik was crouched against me, his soaked pants cold against my arm. From a nearby tent, I heard the sound of muffled retching.