A Replacement Life

by Boris Fishman

  Slava had come directly from Otto’s office. It was easier to be here, in front of Grandfather, than far away. A brief rain had fallen, then settled into a cool evening, the air carrying the impending decay of leaves. In the kitchen, Berta was slicing and dicing, preserving and pickling for the long winter ahead.

  “What is all this?” Slava asked Grandfather.

  Grandfather finished writing down a figure. “You have to know how to make money,” he said without looking up.

  “How?” Slava said. If you taunted him—if you said, No, it’s impossible, no one could do this—you could get out of him any answer you wanted.

  “How,” he snorted. Then, in his forshpeis English, he said, “I no steal, okay?”

  “So you knew English the whole time,” Slava said. “You could have written your own letter.”

  Grandfather picked up a box of prostate tea and began to demonstrate his English. “No shoogar. No gloo-ten.” He squinted. “No pre-zer-va-tiv. What is that?”

  “No chemicals.”

  “Hm.” He put the box down skeptically.

  Berta appeared in the doorway of the kitchen, one plate heaped with fruit, the other with pastries. “Time for snacks, young men,” she said. “Fortify yourselves.”

  “You are an angel, Bertochka,” Grandfather said. To Slava: “She’s an angel.”

  “Food is the way to a man’s heart,” Berta affirmed, laughing.

  “We did notice, Slavchik, you’ve been coming around more often.” Grandfather winked, and he and Berta laughed. Slava joined in, reaching for a triangle of pastry.

  “Excuse the interruption, men, I’m back to the kitchen,” she said.

  “Somebody had a date with Vera Rudinsky,” Grandfather said matter-of-factly. He winked again.

  Slava laughed because there was nothing else to do.

  “Nice place?” Grandfather said.

  If Slava said yes, Grandfather would be envious. If he said no, Grandfather would put her down. Slava said nothing.

  “So, how was it?” Grandfather winked.

  “None of your business,” Slava said kindly. “Nothing happened.”

  “You went to her apartment and nothing happened?”

  “Yes. Nothing happened. We talked and I left.”

  Grandfather’s face fell. “Slavik,” he whispered, gold teeth glittering through his scowl. “Tell me that’s not true.”

  “It’s true,” Slava said.

  Grandfather’s face turned dark. “Slava, for God’s sake. You went to a girl’s house and nothing happened?”

  Slava said nothing, only waited. Let it come.

  “I won’t believe it,” Grandfather said. “Tell me the truth. You—” He smacked his fist into his palm. “You did, right? Like a man?”

  Slava watched the pain in his grandfather’s face for a long moment. “I did,” he lied. “Like a man.”

  “Attaboy!” Grandfather shouted. He yelled out to Berta in the kitchen, “Watch out for this one, girls! He’s no kind of homo!” He turned to look at Slava in triumph, but Slava couldn’t bear to look at him and looked away coldly. Grandfather’s triumphant expression faded into remorse. He would never understand his grandson. With a thick finger, he began pushing around invisible crumbs on the oilcloth.

  Finally, Slava rose, the feet of the chair making a loud noise on the parquet. Grandfather looked like a boy regretful for having made another mistake. He had seen Slava three times in a month, three times more than in the year before, and now his mouth would send Slava away once more. Send him away for reasons he would never grasp, but send him away all the same, that much he understood.

  But it wouldn’t. Slava walked over to Grandfather’s side of the table and laid his arm around the old man’s head. Grandfather reached up and squeezed Slava’s hand. “Love you,” Grandfather burbled in English through the tears in his throat.

  Love you. I no steal.

  The Bratislavan in Arianna’s foyer was relieved to see Slava so early in the evening this time. He beamed, a crooked molar showing. “Nice!” he roared, pointing outside. “Cool down!” Slava pushed out a smile and hauled himself up the stairs. Someone was baking: The staircase was thick with butter and sugar and heat. Again he stood mincing in front of her door. Again he listened for noise on the other side like an intruder. Did he come here only for absolution? That wasn’t what he wanted. He wanted to tell the truth, if only to one person.

  He could hear music rising electronically from her laptop, her voice joining occasionally. Now and again, she addressed the cat. At last, he knocked. She opened the door and lowered and raised her eyes quickly—she did this when she was nervous. Often she didn’t announce what she was feeling, so he had to decode on his own. He got it wrong many times, but many times right, not meaningless considering they had known each other so briefly. Six weeks before, she was a voluptuous shadow on the other side of the wall.

  “It’s from here,” he said, sniffing.

  “I bake when I’m anxious,” she said. “Come in?”

  He stepped inside and embraced her. He tasted all the ingredients on her tongue: lemon cake. Again her eyes fell and rose. When this happened, her face acquired an unkind crease around the lips, as if she resented him for having to become uncomfortable: If he understood what she wanted to know, he should just tell her.

  “I didn’t,” he said.

  She drew back. “What do you mean?”

  “Or I did, but not exactly.” He worked the dome of his head into the crook of her arm. She pushed him away and lifted his face to hers. She called out his name. It was a question.

  The cat offered its diversionary services, parking the front paws on the side of Slava’s right knee and staring up expectantly, what for only the cat knew. Slava forfeited the out and motioned to the couch. There, he told her what he had said to Otto Barber.

  He had expected her sympathy, but none appeared on her face. “That wasn’t what we talked about,” she said coldly.

  He rubbed his eyes.

  “Slava, you promised. You swore. You said it yourself. We agreed.”

  “It had nothing to do with you,” he objected.

  “But then you forced me into it. You could have left me out of it, but you came here, you pulled me into it. Did you know? Did you already know what you were going to do when you promised me?”

  “If I had kept lying, you would have felt even more betrayed. But because I told you, I forced you into it?”

  “You’re right, Slava, this situation is so unfair to you. You try to do the right thing, but the world won’t notice.”

  He groaned.

  “Did you know what you were going to do when you promised me you would tell the truth?” she said. “Just tell me that. Did you come here simply to share the burden?”

  “No,” he said. “I don’t think so. I’m—” He felt a great unhappiness rising within him. “I’m trying to be honest.”

  “It doesn’t matter, does it,” she said despondently. “Whenever you did know, you didn’t come to me. You didn’t tell me.”

  “Probably I didn’t know until I walked into his office,” he said. “I’m telling you now. Arianna, please.”

  “Oh, I know,” she yelped, and covered her face.

  She crossed her legs and looked outside while her teeth worked the edge of her nails. He had never seen her do that. In the window, an old tree swayed tentatively in a light wind. A finger-sized bird, iridescent with emerald plumage, skidded onto a branch, unshamed by its meagerness from setting the bulb of its head at a magnificent angle. The branch swayed a little in answer. Unlike Slava’s windows, which looked into a courtyard, Arianna’s faced into the city. He felt quieter but lonelier at his place.

  “Please go,” she said. “I’m not strong enough to insist on it.”

  “Arianna,” he whispered. “No.”

  “I love when you call out my name,” she said. “You do it rarely. You called it out during sex once . . . I knew it was because you were s
o gone, you’d forgotten I was there. I loved that.”

  He was on the floor beside her again. “Arianna, it’s over. Don’t you see?”

  Her face twitched and she drew a finger under one eye. “Don’t you see? You didn’t take me with you into that room. We agreed you would tell the truth. But you didn’t. At the last moment, you changed your mind. You left me at the door, you looked only after yourself. But how else could it be? You’ve been answering to someone for so long. Oh, why are these things impossible to see in advance. You’re not up to this now, Slava. And I don’t want you like this. Please go.”

  His insides drained. He wobbled, trying to stand up. He had become so accustomed to her understanding that he didn’t know what to do when she withheld it. He scratched out her name, all he could say.

  “I can’t do this with you now,” she said. “Tomorrow we’ll talk—next week. Please go. Be kind to me and go.”

  “You’re not a Boy Scout, Arianna,” he mumbled. “Pick and choose? You don’t care about the rules.”

  “Don’t I?” she said. “I do care about the rules, Slava. The rules that we have with each other, I do.”

  He felt bewilderment. How could he know that this rule, for her, was the unbreakable one? There were so many others that didn’t matter. He could follow instructions—he would now, he would—but not without receiving them in the first place! Once again, he felt himself in the presence of information only he didn’t understand. Everyone was slightly embarrassed that he didn’t.

  “You know, Slava,” she said without looking at him, “when it started and we disagreed all the time, I liked it. I’d rather disagree with someone who’s interesting. Also because those disagreements felt like the frosting; underneath we were the same. But I was wrong, Slava. We are different—all the way through.”

  “But I want to be like you.”

  “But I’m not looking for a student. And you are not looking for a teacher.” She sighed heavily and walked to her bureau. When she returned, she held an old issue of Century. “Happy freedom,” she said.

  It was the issue from all those years ago, the first issue of Century he had come across, in the Hunter library.

  “I stole it,” she said. “From the archive.” She laughed barbarously.

  He didn’t want to—if he took it, he was agreeing to something. But he didn’t dare disobey. His heart curdled at the foxed feel of the old, tawny pages.

  “‘Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away,’” she said bitterly.

  He called out her name again, but she looked at him with such a helpless, crazed expression that he understood the loving thing would be to go. Holding the magazine, he did.

  –20–

  SATURDAY, OCTOBER 14, 2006

  What do the holy books say about the paying of respects to the deceased on the Sabbath? Is it a form of work, prohibited on the sacred day, or a kind of rest? There is no Arianna to ask. Slava might not be long for the answers, but he will look them up anyway. He has to get ready to teach those who come after him.

  From the train platform, the rows of headstones look like children gathered for an assembly. Up close, the graves of the American Jews are as unlike the Russian as two siblings whose parents scratch their heads, wondering how the children turned out so differently. The American graves are enormous slabs, saying only: “Fisher b. 1877 d. 1956.” The Russian are smaller but make up with ornament: scalloped shoulders, roses climbing the panels, multipeaked crowns, and on the stones themselves, beneath suns setting on menorahs that the family of the deceased never lit while he was alive, inscriptions:

  “We miss you, dear one, like the earth misses the rain.”

  “Words have little room, but thoughts fly free.”

  “An evil whirlwind has passed above this earth and taken you into that other world.”

  “Little son, why did you leave us so soon?”

  The mortuary Seurat who has etched the face of this last unlucky addressee in a pointillist style rendered even his incipient mustache. Eighteen years old. Auto accident. He is the cup and saucer who broke on arrival, the rest of the set having to carry on incomplete. It is a blessing to die in the natural order.

  You can tell the anniversaries by the heaps of flowers. The cemetery has set out notices about stagnant water and West Nile virus, so the flowers are mostly plastic, a rare act of civic obedience. These last longer and require less maintenance anyway.

  You can tell the new graves by the eight-by-elevens, encased in cellophane to defend from rain, wedged into humps of freshly turned earth. A Soviet-Jewish family tends not to wait a year before unveiling a tombstone, as Jewish custom dictates, but neither does it erect one immediately, as it would have in the Soviet Union. It strikes a murky compromise between worlds whose logic is clear only to its members: one month or two.

  Slava’s secret descendant, he of the beer can and the accentless tongue, how long will he wait? There is a Hasidic belief that three generations of deceased ancestors keep watch over the newlyweds under a chuppah. Slava wants an inversion of this teaching—three generations of unborn descendants keeping watch over a grave. As he strides down Tulip Row A, approaching Grandmother’s plot, flowerless but with a notebook in hand, they wait for him by her stone.

  How will I explain to you how we lived, there and here? There, our evenings spent in some living room—for there was really nowhere to go—fearful but safe, insecure but joyful, guarded but open? And here, the reused paper towels, the boxes of instruction manuals saved for some future loss of direction, the receipts organized in an accounting of every indulgence?

  But you must know these things, for you will replace me as I am replacing them.

  In the distance, a mower whines in the hands of a groundskeeper. Behind the noise, you can hear—after all—the train running its fingers across the ribs of the tracks. It comes through the pavement and into your feet.

  The pair of tombstones in front of Slava grows apart only at the hips. Gelman, the common plinth says. Grandfather’s is blank; Grandmother’s has the poem. Her face is etched in the same pointillist style; the local Seurat must have a monopoly. Grandfather’s stone is black, Grandmother’s the stippled chestnut of a bay horse. The crown of his stone rises slightly above hers, a shoulder.

  The turf is even on both sides of the plot, flecks of freshly cut grass clinging to the knees of the common stone. The custodians must have mowed since Grandfather and Berta last visited; Grandfather wouldn’t permit the flecks to remain, Berta nicking them away with her mother-of-pearl nails.

  Slava sits down on the paved path that runs alongside the plots and gives his greeting to Grandmother. He decides that she does not need small talk. They will talk in a different way. He would like to meet her all over again, their recent encounters untrue. How? He opens his notebook. A blank page looks at him with doubt. Doubt enough of his own he’s got. He touches a pen to the paper, moves it off, brings it back. His untrustworthy imagination whispers to him, the sound of new treason. He listens, waits, listens, brings pen to paper again.

  Q: Did I betray you by inventing all those things?

  A: How? You’re being foolish.

  Q: I would like you to be truthful with me.

  A: No, you did not.

  Q: I am here only to talk with you. There is no other reason.

  A: Then why do you have the notebook?

  Q: It’s how I understand things. You will live in it.

  A: I live in your heart.

  Q: The heart is unreliable, a notebook is forever.

  A: That isn’t why. But it doesn’t matter. Write, write.

  Q: When you slipped out of the ghetto, did you know you would never see your parents again?

  A: No. The mind doesn’t prepare for death.

  Q: Were you afraid, going to the woods? You were only fifteen. I think of myself at fifteen.

  A: I was a city girl, of course I was frightened. But I don’t remember being frightened. You are in such terror that you do
n’t feel . . . anything. You move because there is something working inside you, you don’t know what. And then another day, for minutes, whole minutes at a time, it seems as if everything is normal, absolutely normal—it’s the old you, and things are just as they were . . .

  Q: What should I say from you? To Grandfather or Mother.

  A: He can’t live without your admiration. And she—call her again, for no reason.

  Q: Can I bring you something?

  A: This is how we used to talk when we were calling from a trip: “Can we bring something?” No—you’re here, what else do I need.

  It isn’t her, because she never spoke like this. But she is no longer around to answer for herself. And so she will have to live on in the adulterated form in which he must imagine her. He cannot strip himself out of the imagining. If she is to live, she will live as Slava+Grandmother, one person at last.

  “Boy! Boy!” a woman shouts as she rushes down the path, the plea of a fist in the air. She is already clothed for winter—a heavy coat, a beret on her head. “Boy,” she repeats as she draws near, out of breath. “How could you sit on the pavement like that? You will catch cold, and then what? How would your”—she squints at the grave, considers the years of birth and death—“how would your grandmother like that? Answer me.”

  Slava smiles and rises. “Thank you,” he says.

  “The weather’s changing,” she says. “That’s always the vulnerable time. Look after yourself. God bless you for looking in on your grandmother.”

  After she disappears down an alleyway, Slava returns to the ground, though not to the pavement; after all, he has promised. He comes down to the grass, to Grandfather’s unused side of the plot, next to Grandmother. The pavement already holds the chill of autumn, but the grass is still heedless and warm, as if summer is never going to end. He thinks of Arianna, the singed grass of Bryant Park underneath them, his head on her thigh, the saxophone going off at the other end of the park, the ordinariness that hides the miraculous.

  The world above is endless and blue. Slava runs his fingers through Grandmother’s side of the plot, the short, prickly grass like Grandfather’s face after a day without shaving. Her pliant, puckered flesh was so inadequate to protect the fragile body beneath it that the last time she had enough strength to go out, the sons of another family—each the size of a bureau, each overjoyed to see her well enough to come for a party—embraced her so fervidly that they broke two of her ribs.