A Replacement Life

by Boris Fishman

  The earth is the color of chocolate, so damp and moist it looks like you can spread it on bread. It runs into everything—coffee, underwear, letters. Slava is writing a letter. In Yiddish. His hands make out the sinewy bends and blocks, the letters bowing and scraping. The battalion commander is down in the trench, too, smoking a Belomor, the filter crushed between his fingers, and laughing at the letter.

  “You owe the fascists, Yid. We weren’t distracted, you’d get your ass strung up for writing letters like that.” He kicks some dirt toward Slava, but halfheartedly, with a friendly contempt. “So it’s like they say, then,” he says. “The Yids and fascists are in cahoots.” He laughs again, mirthlessly this time, loses his smile, spits.

  Several yards from the trench stands a simple wooden table with two high-backed chairs lodged unevenly into a mound of black earth-chocolate. The table has been hacked together from the Belarusian birch that rises synonymously all around. The chairs—wicker chairs, with seat cushions tied by neat bows at the backs—are the first chairs the Gelmans had in America, lifted on a lucky evening from some curbside.

  Every minute or so, the table and chairs tremble from a distant eruption. Uncle Aaron—Grandfather’s brother, the unkissed virgin whose fingers Grandfather hunted with a butcher knife to disqualify him from the draft—sits in one of the chairs, his arms folded, looking at a heap of mackerel dripping oil onto a jaundiced copy of Komsomol’skaia Pravda, the words running together. His field jacket is unbuttoned. A tuft of chest hair pokes out of the open collar.

  Grandfather is seated on the other side of the table, pointing angrily with his right hand. He’s trying to explain something. His left hand is closed around his neck, as if he is wounded or trying to protect himself.

  Aaron becomes angry. His arms go wide, as if to say, Well, what do you want from me? How can I change that? Grandfather slaps the table. Another muffled boom. Aaron folds his arms and looks down at the table. “Vi gob ikh ikent visn funderuf?” he says in Yiddish. “How was I supposed to know?”

  There is another boom, closer this time; it kicks clods of earth onto the table. Slava waves his hands from the trench, trying to get their attention, but they are busy arguing. He tries to climb out, but the earth is too wet and crumbles in his hands. The chocolate smears his fingers. The battalion commander is laughing again and banging his fist on the ground. The booms are one after the next now. The mackerel has slipped to the ground, swimming in a chocolate sea. Slava is shouting so hard that his throat is tight, his hand rising to shield it.

  Finally, the table is knocked to the side. Aaron still has his arms across his chest, but both he and Grandfather are staring regretfully at the earth floating beneath them. Then Aaron looks over at Slava.

  He is clownish, almost: a squat face with a broad forehead, the nose like a young potato under broadly lit silver eyes. The hair rises in a wave above his forehead, the face smudged with grease from his Degtyaryov. It’s a worn face, but still young underneath, the unkissed boy, and it lightens when he sees Slava.

  They stare at each other, preparing for something. Then Aaron’s face lifts, as if he has found the thing he’s been looking to say, and he’s starting to lean forward when the next boom hits. A hailstorm of damp earth. Like sediment in a stream, it carries a soldier’s peaked cap, Yiddish letters, gold teeth.

  Slava awoke in Grandfather’s new bed, already darkness outside, only a tube of light at the foot of the door: the Katznelsons, the Aronsons, all those who had accepted Grandfather’s invitation to come and kibitz while their applications received finishing touches from their adjutants, the children and grandchildren. The applications had to be postmarked to the Claims Conference by the following morning. The applicants were not going to wait to find out if the German government would expand eligibility so they could apply legally.

  Walking from the train to Grandfather’s, Slava had kept to the shadows, turning around periodically as if Otto Barber were panting somewhere behind. Then he moved to the center of the sidewalk. He could be walking to his grandfather’s for perfectly innocent reasons. Besides, he had already been caught. He was free.

  Little by little, the bedroom revealed its shape in the darkness: Grandfather’s new bed; the armoire where some of Grandmother’s things still hung; the stockpile of paper towels, footbaths, and mouthwash that Grandfather acquired under some unknown arrangement with the pharmacy.

  Slava rose heavily and pushed open the bedroom door, the voices rising. How long had he slept? He came straight from work. He crossed the threshold, and all of a sudden pudgy, jeweled hands were at his forehead, remarking on its pallor. “On prosto ustavshi, skol’ko zhe on pishet, predstav’te! Otpustite ego, zhenshchiny!” He’s simply tired, imagine how much he’s been writing; let him go, women! Grandfather watched uneasily, his left hand covering his collarbone, just as in the dream. He had taken to keeping it there lately.

  It was Grandfather’s idea: everyone who hadn’t mailed the application, in one place, the evening before the deadline. Everyone was surprised that Grandfather would propose it. Berta undertook an epic shopping excursion while Slava’s mother called everyone on a list he had made of the letters he’d written. No one wanted to be disqualified because he forgot to photocopy his birth certificate. For this, feuds and misunderstandings could be laid aside for a night, insults temporarily forgotten, dead friendships briefly revived.

  Someone’s enterprising daughter drew up a checklist, taped to the refrigerator (she had taped it to the wall, but fearing marks to Slava’s father’s paint job, Berta moved it discreetly):

  Did you fill out Form 88-J?_____

  Did you photocopy your green card/citizenship certificate/permanent alien card/passport?_____

  Did you include two witnesses?_____

  From the guest list Slava’s mother had prepared, the young woman copied the last names of every one of these permanent aliens, forming a table. Before anyone left, they had to check all the boxes. Next to the list was a stool: paper clips, a stapler, folders, pens. It was a war room.

  Slava watched, unnoticed, from the threshold of the living room, forks scraping against plates and wafers being dunked into tea: Anna Shpungin (Kishinev/Bay Ridge), Feyga Shlomberg (Riga/Sheepshead Bay); Borukh Feinberg (Gomel/Borough Park). Slava had written letters for them all: the insulted and the injured, monsters from a place their blood would never know again.

  They had been there since the afternoon, the stapling and filing staffs gradually joining, the younger generation’s professions determining the order of appearance: the physical therapists, then the pharmacists, followed by the publicists and accountants, and finally, the lawyers and doctors. It was already past nine. They were still waiting for the investment bankers.

  Who had called Otto Barber? Was it Lyuba Rudinsky, unable to let go of her grudge before one final comeuppance for the high heads of the Gelmans? Was it someone Slava turned down, angry at having to do without what everyone else was getting? They had struck a moral bargain with themselves; they would say someone was forging, but they wouldn’t say who. Or perhaps Otto had lied about the Century goose chase, and Slava really was named by the caller. But why? Slava stopped himself. Once you started making things up, everything was up for doubt.

  Slava crossed into the living room, and the conversation stilled. A male voice said: “A vot nash pisatel’!” And here is our writer. They began to clap, everyone, the old and the young, the sound loud enough to reach the Mexicans downstairs, and someone—it was Garik, Vera’s father, the full complement of Rudinskys had come—even stuck two fingers in his mouth and whistled, which made everyone laugh. Vera laughed, too. She caught Slava’s gaze and smiled. He smiled back. The sight of her after the evening with Otto was consoling to an erotic degree, a surprise.

  Soon others arrived, and with their appearance, the moment vanished. Slava kept checking the door for Israel—if he could hobble over to the synagogue, he could hobble over here—but there was no sign. Someone arrived with a
whinnying infant. The little head wobbled and lifted, wobbled and lifted, like a drunk person’s. What customs would this small person follow? Would his little tongue curl away from kvass, the tiny nose indifferent to the smell of butter and onions in a linoleum kitchen? In some yard sticky with summer, the now grown fingers wrapped around a can of warming beer, would his head whir to calculate, for the benefit of some pale-skinned American girl, what portion of itself it owed to the chocolate loam of that other place? When, some years on, his great-grandmother, for whom his uncle Slava had once forged a letter, passed away, the Holocaust-funds-renewal certificate trailing her death by a month, would he trace the uncertain curlicues of her name in English as if her hand were his own? Or would he follow the law?

  When no one was looking, Slava took into the bathroom a matchbox and the lined piece of notebook paper with the names of everyone for whom he had written letters. There was no point: Otto knew what he wanted to know, and yet. The paper burned quickly, the edges curling into his hand, so that Slava had to drop it in the sink and start again. This would be more difficult with the list affixed to the refrigerator; Slava’s mother wanted to frame it. She was out there now, she and Lyuba Rudinsky clutching each other like lost sisters.

  Slava stepped out of the bathroom. On the edge of the beige leather sofa, an older man whom he didn’t know was lecturing a wild-eyed boy in a FUBU T-shirt. The boy didn’t seem to know Russian too well, but he listened, nodding politely. Next to them, one of the granddaughters was leading her grandmother through the letters on the boy’s T-shirt, an impromptu English lesson. “Foo-boo,” the grandmother telescoped her tongue. She really wanted to learn.

  “And he says, ‘I am going to be a writer!’” Slava heard Grandfather say to the woman next to him on the love seat. She was nodding wearily; she knew the routine. “How do you like that? He was getting offers from— Hey, Slavchik!” Grandfather yelled. He waved Slava over. When Slava approached, Grandfather wrapped his free palm around Slava’s forearm like a glass of water.

  “What is this new affectation?” Slava said, nodding at Grandfather’s other hand, wrapped around his collarbone.

  “Nothing, nothing,” Grandfather said, dropping it to his side. He turned back to the woman. “This university, that university, some bank, a senator,” he continued to lie. “They all wanted him. Six figures. But Slavik said, ‘Not for me. Anyone can become one of those financiers. I want to be a writer. I want to help you, Grandfather.’ And so we said, ‘We will do everything’—Regina Alekseevna, I don’t have to explain, do I?—‘whatever you need, we are going to help.’”

  Regina Alekseevna nodded obediently.

  Grandfather looked up at Slava. “Who wanted you to work for him, Slavik? Who was that senator?”

  “Schumer,” Slava invented. “The senator from New York.”

  “Not Kennedy?” Grandfather said disappointedly.

  “Not Kennedy,” Slava said, spreading his arms in apology.

  “Well, anyway,” Grandfather said. “This Shuma wanted them to write a book together, you see.”

  As Grandfather talked on, Slava ran his free palm through Grandfather’s hair. It felt different than Slava expected, rough and dry instead of silky and ageless. That memory of it, Slava realized, was a decade old.

  Slava knew why Grandfather kept a hand at his neck: a talisman. Against undefined rasps in the throat, against illness, against death. Slava wanted to pry it away, return it to the lap of Grandfather’s natty corduroys, to Grandfather’s forehead, so it could keep the mental abacus warm as Grandfather made his calculations: No, it’s not too late for him to become a businessman, not late at all . . .

  One morning after Grandmother’s death, Berta had found Grandfather in bed surrounded by a moat of chairs, the backs facing him. “No, no, no,” Berta exclaimed, rushing the bed. “You can’t, you can’t.” He didn’t know how they’d gotten there.

  Maybe Grandfather had begun covering his neck long before Grandmother died, only Slava hadn’t been around to notice. Maybe, while Slava was gone, Grandfather got old, his lying mind his only health. If you can invent, you must be alive still. Grandfather is. What would Grandfather tell Otto Barber?

  Slava knew. Grandfather would shrug. He would express the deepest desire to help. Unfortunately, he had no information to offer but would as soon as he heard anything, naturally. Grandfather would let the letters go to Herr Schuler, may they all get covered up to their heads. And Grandmother would look on approvingly from the side. How else could it be? If she had wanted Grandfather to stop, she would have made him. Slava didn’t know many things about her, but he knew her power. And she didn’t stop Grandfather. Why would she have? To a friend she would not lie, but to the law she would not tell the truth. (What law? Where was the law when the Minsk ghetto was being “liquidated” along with her mother, father, and grandfather?) For a person like Grandmother, there was no law but what we find in each other. And Grandfather was the man she had found. Slava lived in a different country. A lie meant something different here, even if it was easier to pull off thanks to the American insistence on imagining the best about the next person. It wasn’t difficult at all to lie here, Slava had discovered with some regret, as it devalued his duplicities compared to Grandfather’s. Slava’s new country asked less of his ingenuity than the Soviet Union had asked of his grandfather. It would take nothing for Slava to deceive Otto Barber.

  Slava patted Grandfather on his no longer silky hair and kissed his forehead, the kind gesture allowing Grandfather, in the calculus of affection demonstrated to Regina Alekseevna, to release Slava’s arm. What if Slava, naive Slava—his grandfather would run circles around him until his last day—had it backward about Grandfather’s friends? What if Grandfather wanted to have them in his life but couldn’t because he had lied about his age during the war to delay the draft? He told big stories about needing to mind the official records in Moscow or Minsk, but it was the Katznelsons, Kogans, and Rubinshteins that he had to continue to fool, to persuade that simply he had been too young for the draft in 1943, the year that was “cut down” in full: the year Dodik Katznelson lost a brother, Grisha Kogan three brothers, and Nina Rubinshtein enough cousins to fill a village, as they had before the war. The Katznelsons, Kogans, and Rubinshteins were Grandfather’s undisappearing accounting, long after he had disappeared from the Soviet Union. He hated them for it. This was why no one appeared in his home. He didn’t want anyone there, stumbling accidentally on the truth.

  He couldn’t explain it this way to Slava, so he invented their insults, their distance. He kept inventing and inventing, unable to stop, until he had ended up alone, without friends, without his grandson. He had survived the war at the price of punishing himself for the rest of his life with the lie that had made it possible. Vera had saved Grandfather with the Rudinskys. Had tricked him when no one else could, granted him reconciliation without requiring a reckoning. Slava had saved him with the rest.

  It was close to midnight by the time the guests started to leave. There were long kisses, embraces inside humid necklines, unmeant promises to call regularly now.

  Slava watched Vera help her grandfather Lazar into his jacket. Lazar’s eyes were empty. He trembled as Vera walked him down the hallway, a branch quaking in the wind. When he pulled even with Slava in the line of farewell-wishers—Mother, Father, Berta subbing for Grandmother, Grandfather, Slava—Lazar lifted a trembling hand and clasped Slava’s, pulling it gently. He was phlox-colored, the skin stale and soft, the mouth in decay. Closer, closer, he gestured. Slava placed his ear next to Lazar’s spittle-covered mouth, thinking he wished to say something, but Lazar only turned his face until it was even with Slava’s cheek and kissed him there, his lips flat and dry. They left no trace except what Slava imagined.

  “Here,” Lazar said. “Here.” He lifted his right hand, gnarled and shivering, and wedged a piece of material into Slava’s hand. In Slava’s hand was a rectangle of white cloth with an address, the kind Jews
in the Minsk ghetto were required to wear underneath their yellow stars. It said: “54 Krymskaya.” And underneath: “Rudinsky.”

  “My great-grandmother,” Vera said, leaning into be heard. “Grandfather’s mother.” Slava could smell her perfume, jasmine and honey. She spoke to him in Russian, so Lazar could understand. Her English was plain, colorless, sometimes even incorrect, but her Russian—at least to Slava’s ears, because she owned it far better than he—was as elegant as a palace. He felt overseen by it; for a passing moment, the two of them felt unnoticeable in the most crowded place in the apartment.

  “This is a hallway, not a dance club!” someone farther back in line said half jokingly.

  “Why don’t you let the youth speak, cow!” Lazar said with startling vigor. And then, under his breath, “If you lost some weight, you wouldn’t have trouble squeezing past.”

  Vera and Slava laughed. “He wants you to have it, that’s all,” she said.

  “Do you have to go?” Slava blurted out.

  She thought about the answer but not long. “There’s a bar close to where I live,” she said. She gave him the name. “I’ll wait for you there.”

  The bar had bordello-red velvet couches and multiple television screens showing sports. They were the only ones there; the bartender, a young woman wearing an olive-green tank top and leather bands on both wrists, was flipping through a magazine.

  “What are you thinking about?” Vera said. She sat in a high-backed banquette, her back arched, the edge of her skirt lapping her knees.

  “Someone I wrote a letter for,” Slava said. “He wasn’t there tonight.”

  “You spend a lot of time with old people now,” she said.

  “You said they are lonely,” he said.

  “Let’s bring you back to young-people time,” she said. “Let’s dance.”

  “Here?” he said. There was a sneering song coming out of the speakers.

  “Wait,” she said. She rose and walked over to the bartender. A moment later, the music changed.