A Replacement Life

by Boris Fishman

  “What’s this?”

  “There was a misunderstanding,” Slava said. “I don’t know how much it was, but two-fifty to start.”

  “It was two-fifty.”

  “Then we’re square.”

  “But who gives you for the work?”

  “I’ve been given.” Slava rose and tucked the envelope into the pocket of Israel’s uniform. “Let’s go. I’ve got a long night ahead.”

  “You’re still giving us our tales of woe and deceit?”

  “Those very same,” Slava said.

  “And what happens when it’s all over?” Israel said. “The deadline’s next week. What do you do at that magazine of yours, anyway?”

  “If some small newspaper somewhere makes a mistake, we make a joke about it.”

  “We had that in Russia, too. The capital likes to laugh at the provinces. Makes it feel like the capital.”

  Slava shrugged. That work seemed so remote. After submitting the fabricated entries for “The Hoot,” Slava returned to properly sourced items, though largely because he’d hit a lucky streak and, for a week or two, the flubs were finding him. But he was dry again, and in the past two weeks, he had slipped in a couple of inventions. It didn’t matter. Slava’s heroic bulwarking of the national decline of small-town newspapers through the invention of the Rinkelrinck (Ark.) Gazette had earned notice neither in Arkansas nor Century.

  “I was going to heat up some soup for us,” Israel said. “From a can but excellent.”

  Slava saw Israel climbing into the cupboard where the synagogue’s gifts collected, withdrawing a can of soup too large for one—what he lacked in human variety, Israel made up for soup-wise: carrot ginger, black bean, ten-vegetable—and slurping alone in the falling light outside his ground-level window.

  “Next time,” Slava promised.

  “You said that last time,” Israel said, acquiring a pained expression. Slava felt a familiar wave of guilt. Israel cocked his eyebrows. “Ha! Take it easy, I’m kidding. Slow on the uptake, you are.” He clapped Slava on the shoulder. “Listen, what is your attitude toward presents?”

  “Presents?”

  “Presents. Good times, laughter, a long table, a bottle or three. You’re a heavy one.”

  “When I want a good time, I call you to hear a compliment.”

  “Self-pity flatters no man. I want you to take this money back. And have a good time.”

  “How many months did it take you to collect that amount?” Slava said.

  “This is the use that would make me most satisfied.”

  For a third time that evening, Slava’s hand closed around the accursed envelope.

  –13–

  Slava dragged the ton of himself home. On the subway, he tried to jot down ideas for Lazar’s letter, but he had none. The old man was right—what had happened to him (labor battalion, infantry, Stalingrad, hearing) was useless. Also, Slava was out of ideas. Every single item that Slava had scratched into his notebook from the history books had a line through it.

  Eliyahu Mishkin, head of Judenrat—no, Epstein has done.

  45 Jews roped together and ordered buried alive by 30 Russian prisoners. The Russians refuse. All 75 killed.

  Last handful of surviving Jews when Red Army liberates.

  Himmler nauseated by witnessing shooting of 100 Jews. Bach-Zelewski says it was “only a hundred.” This has to be done more efficiently—more humanely, Himmler says. For the Germans, but also for the Jews. (!) Poison gas arises from this . . . But this won’t do, how would an inmate know any of this?!

  The coarseness of the last entry forced up a nauseating taste in his throat. Was he a monster, the details of death merely the instruments of a story, kindling for a vocation he didn’t have the talent to practice another way? However, those details made for good stories—stories that stayed with him days after he’d written them, and would earn money for sufferers. What was coarse, then? When he abandoned his grandmother—that was coarse. When he agreed to stop at undetailed reverence and inquire no further about her—that was coarse. Perhaps one becomes aware of one’s coarseness only when it’s too late to do anything about it: Isaac Newton’s little-known Fourth Law of Motion, Pertaining to the Maneuvers of the Soul.

  What was coarser, to revere someone falsely for sainthood, or to know someone’s sin but intimately? And if you couldn’t know, then invent. Slava had not planned to have his grandmother stare Shulamit into suffocating her baby. (She hadn’t, had she? He didn’t answer.) Grandmother was fierce, everyone said, and he was trying to make her fierce, but then she wriggled out of his hands and started staring at Shulamit in that basement. (Did that mean Grandmother would have suffocated her own child?) If you wanted to write a good story, the facts had to become a story’s instruments. You couldn’t write without being coarse to the facts.

  Slava noticed a cyclist staring at him from several seats away. In fact, he had been staring for quite a while, Slava noted belatedly. As soon as Slava looked back, the cyclist turned back to his phone. When had he gotten on? The same stop as Slava, Slava was suddenly sure. Again, his heart started going. “Twenty-five-year-old suffers heart attack on the D train. At an age when others are swaddling children and commanding platoons under Stalingrad, he is felled by anxiety at being pursued for a crime. ‘He wet his underpants for no reason, that one,’ Yevgeny Gelman, a philosopher, said from a low stool.”

  They stormed into Fifty-Fifth Street. Slava kept track of the cyclist out of one eye. The train took an eternity to come to a halt. Finally, the doors opened. Slava waited, his heart in his throat. Wait, wait, wait. The conductor began to announce the next stop. Wait. The doors dinged, signaling they were about to close. Now! Slava barreled from his seat and out onto the platform, the doors sliding closed behind him, no time for the cyclist to pursue him. Slava, a rookie, could not resist turning back to gloat at his pursuer as the train pulled away, but the cyclist was absentmindedly chewing on a fingernail.

  Slava sat on the platform, alone, his head in his hands. He took out his cell phone, called his mother, still at the Rudinskys’—now she and Aunt Lyuba were best friends, now they’d go long into the night—and asked for his grandfather.

  “You making peace?” Slava said.

  “Schnorrers.”

  “Go into the kitchen, please,” Slava said. He waited until his instructions were heeded. “How long have you been charging?”

  “It’s all for you.”

  “I don’t want it.”

  “Calm down. They’re going to get ten thousand euros, what’s five hundred the cost?”

  “So you gave Lazar a break? Two-fifty.”

  “Goodwill.”

  “I don’t want to do this anymore,” Slava said.

  “It’s almost over. The deadline is next week.”

  “It’s not the money.”

  “Now you don’t want to do it? You liked it fine five minutes ago. When you say you’re going to do something, you have to do it to the end. That’s what a man does. So, what, you’re not going to do Lazar’s?”

  “Give his money back.”

  “I’m not giving his money back.”

  “These people hate you. Because you do—this.”

  “Who hates me? They envy me. They wish they could do it.”

  “That’s not the truth.”

  “Who tells the truth.”

  “That’s the truth.”

  “How did it go with Vera?”

  “They dressed her like a doll for me.”

  “So, she looks after herself. What she does—piar, what is that?”

  “I don’t know how to explain it,” Slava said. “It’s like advertising. The shampoo commercial with the woman whose hair is like after electroshock? And then she’s twirling with the umbrella?”

  “Vera sells shampoo?”

  “No. I don’t know. It’s just an example.”

  “There’s a nice girl, Slavik.”

  “She wants to reunite you—that’s all she w
ants. She’s obsessed.”

  “My heart aches, Lazar is so sick. Your grandfather is a rock compared to these guys.”

  “You’re in pieces every time I call.”

  “I’m a frail man and my wife’s just passed away, what do you want. Do you know how much I’ve been through?”

  “Look, do you know anything about how Grandmother got out of the ghetto? How she made it out, how it all ended?”

  “I wish I could say something,” Grandfather said. “I’ve told you everything.”

  This conversation had become a nightly ritual, a minyan of two, readings from the slender book of Sofia Gelman née Dreitser. Usually, it went the same way—he had told Slava everything—but Slava called anyway. Sometimes a detail floated up through the murk of his brain, and sometimes Slava called just to make sure he was still breathing.

  “I wish I’d made her tell me,” Slava said.

  “It was because you loved her that you didn’t,” Grandfather said.

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

  Lazar Rudinsky

  Soon after the start of the war, an underground network formed in the Minsk ghetto. We organized contacts between the partisans, couriers from outside the ghetto, and ghetto workers who could carry off radios, iodine, cartridge belts. I worked in a tool shop, where I helped in what you could call a negative capacity. We mixed sand into the lubricant they used to clean their guns. We all tried to do something. Cobblers drove nails up their boots. At the auto-repair shop, they ground emery dust into the engine oil; it melted the bearings when they started their Volkswagens.

  There was a neighborhood girl named Ada—she is dead now, may the earth be like down for her—whom I would see once in a while as they marched the work columns back to the ghetto. She was on a detail carting firewood for the building that the Germans were using for headquarters. Your heart dropped seeing these girls: our girls, plus some who had been brought from Austria and Germany. (They called these “the Hamburg girls,” even though they were from all over.) The Belarusian policemen made them walk on the roadway while city people jeered and threw spoiled fruit from the sidewalks. Not everyone—people cried, too, watching these Jewish girls being led to labor like horses.

  Ada signaled to me one time; this was March 1943. We had known each other slightly in the neighborhood, but she didn’t circulate with my kind. I was too much a “child of other people’s gardens,” as we used to say. Maybe that’s what made her turn to me for help.

  At headquarters, there was a German, a Hauptmann Weidt. He worked in the quartermaster service corps. Weidt had fallen in love with one of the Hamburg girls. Ilse. I had seen her, too. She couldn’t have been over eighteen. God had touched this girl—she was radiant. Weidt was almost three times her age. One afternoon, Ada told me, Ilse and Ada had been pushing a wheelbarrow when Weidt pulled them into a doorway and locked them in a closet. Soon, they heard wailing and that kchyum-kchyum-kchyum that you never forget. They were shooting the girls right in the courtyard. They had made them take off their clothes and shot them, one after the next.

  Weidt had no special feeling for Ada, but Ilse, both of whose parents had been buried alive, was nearly mute, so Ada, who knew a little German, which after all is similar to our Yiddish, became like a go-between. It was the two of them he called when it was time to pick up lunch coupons for the work detail. While Ada choked on a pot of soup with beef chunks that Weidt had called up from the mess hall as if for himself, he and Ilse spoke quietly, their language the only thing they shared. Eventually, Weidt decided he wanted to get Ilse out. His rank was too junior for him to do much. The only way was to smuggle her to the partisans.

  “What should I do?” Ada whispered to me. “He’s in charge of all the equipment. He can get a work truck for twenty-five people.”

  “How do you know it isn’t a trick?” I said.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “The way he looks at her? The other day he asked me why Jews were being killed. I nearly jumped out of my skin. I should ask him, the blockhead! He said the German officers used to flirt with the Jewish girls during World War I, and now he has to make me cart firewood.”

  Several days before, the Germans had finished off the ghetto orphanage. Kube, the generalkommissar for Belarus, had made a special visit. He threw candies to the children as they were tossed alive into a pit and covered with sand. It was hard to argue for staying. In the next several days, I made contact with a partly Jewish partisan unit in Rusakovichi. The reaction was mixed, but the commander ordered us to go ahead. Weidt refused to arrange so many, but Ada was tough. She said twenty-five or no one. Eventually, he gave in. He was going to come, too.

  I went to speak to my father, but he refused to leave without Zeyde, and the partisans wouldn’t take an old, ailing man. Zeyde cursed at my father from the cot, but my father didn’t want to discuss it. My father was a ferryman before the war; he delivered safes by horse cart. This was the age before elevators—he carted the safes to the third and fourth floor on his back. The man died without a file at the medical clinic. So you didn’t argue much with him. He said I would go and they would follow soon after. After all, they’d made it this far. It was just a matter of time before Minsk was liberated. By then we had heard about Moscow, Stalingrad—it seemed like a reasonable thing to say. You believed him when he spoke.

  The cover for the truck detail was an assignment to load cement at the railway station, on the outskirts of town. The partisans had said they would be waiting in one of three villages not far from the station. The driver was an ordinary German soldier. He had no idea about Weidt’s plans, but I guess we benefited from the German fanaticism about protocol. As we rolled past the railway station, he didn’t say a word.

  After hours of driving from village to village, we stumbled onto a forward unit in Rusakovichi, which we had passed twice. The partisans made a mistake; they thought the driver was Weidt and approached off-guard. The soldier had time to fire off several rounds, killing one partisan and wounding another. Weidt had a bullet in the soldier’s skull before any of the partisans had time to shoot back.

  We slept the sleep of the free for the first time since July 1941, not really believing it—Ada and I, with Ilse squeezed between us like a child, in a tiny zemlyanka covered with birch leaves. Weidt they took to the commander’s. We woke to shouting, thinking it had all ended so quickly, but it turned out that one of the partisans had lost his temper and was whaling Weidt. It was his brother who had been killed before in the mix-up with the driver. Weidt had his hands bound; the commander waited some time before interfering.

  Weidt was gone by the time we awoke. A girl from night watch told us that he had been taken to partisan headquarters for the area; he had begged to say goodbye to Ilse. We never heard from him again. The Minsk ghetto was liquidated a month later. My father had picked such a terrible instance to be wrong for the first time in his life. When the commander made the announcement, I sat down on the grass and could not stand. Then, when no one was looking, I got some rope and walked off until I was out of sight in a clearing with tall trees. I was testing branches for give when Ada appeared. She had followed me. I wept into her shirt until it was soaked. It was a coarse shirt, fashioned from a sack that once held potatoes, and her skin was raw from it. But she managed to stop me.

  A month later, I was ordered to join a mobile fighting unit and didn’t see Ada again until after the war, back in the neighborhood. She kept her distance, like old times, and never mentioned the day in the clearing. One night about six months after the war ended, there was a dance in a little club on Shornaya. There was a bomb crater in one of the walls; they hadn’t had time to fix it. Three quarters of Minsk was on the ground. You could feel the cold air through the wall once in a while. I was with my friends, Ada with hers, but at one point she came over. “Lazar, help,” she said. “There’s a captain over there who keeps asking me to dance. Says he wants to escort me hom
e. I’m frightened.”

  “Am I just a thug?” I said. She looked away resentfully. “Fine,” I said. “I help you with the captain, you go with me on a date.”

  She refused, so I returned to my friends, leaving her to stand there alone.

  She came over. “So be it,” she said. “One date.”

  The captain and I knew each other from the neighborhood. He lived by Tatar Gardens. You had to take it easy with army captains, but I was something, too. I’m an old camel now, but back then, sparks flew from my feet when I walked—you could light a cigarette if you wanted. I was known in the neighborhood. Anyway, I went over, put my arm around him, and said: “Captain, I just wanted to thank you.”

  “What for?” he said. He was nervous, you could see.

  “For not letting my girl get lonesome.” I pointed to Ada.

  He turned the color of a sugar beet. “I had no idea. Forgive me, Lazar. You’re a lucky fellow.”

  I walked Ada home that night. On our first date, she sat about a kilometer away from me. But she agreed to a second. I had a while of persuading ahead of me; we weren’t married for another two years.

  Move forward forty years. We were just about to emigrate to America. I was watching television when I heard Ada scream out my name. In the newspaper, there was an advertisement from an Ilse Shusterman, searching for fellow inmates from the Minsk ghetto. Ada flew to Krasnodar to meet with her. Except for a lot of wrinkles, Ilse was the same beautiful girl, married to a scientist, a grandmother already, spoke fluent Russian. Before leaving, Ada asked if she had ever heard anything about Weidt. Ilse said that she had been told by the partisans that he had been assigned to a German POW camp. He had died there, for undisclosed reasons.

  Did Ilse ever feel anything for Weidt? Ada didn’t dare ask, and Ilse didn’t volunteer. I doubt it. But it’s to them that Ada and I owe the fifty-seven years that we had together.

  Eighty thousand Jews lived in the Minsk ghetto, almost all of them killed. After the war, they got a memorial stone by one of the killing pits; it actually said Jews died here, as opposed to “Soviet patriots,” which is what it said almost everywhere else—if they put up a plaque in the first place. After the war, the government kept saying they were going to tear down the memorial and fill in the pit.