Immigrant City

by David Bezmozgis

  “There you are, Roman,” his wife said when he entered. This caused the man to turn in his chair to face him. Introductions were unnecessary, but his wife identified him as Edik Svirsky.

  Svirsky looked to be in his middle thirties, with a haggard though handsome face. His eyes were gentle, brown and filled—as the saying went—with all the sorrow of the Jewish people. His hair, like a boy’s, peaked in the middle. He was thin, but his hands, which fidgeted nervously, were large and strong, the nails dirty from the scrapyard.

  “We just called you at the office, but you had already gone,” his wife said.

  She shifted a cup and a saucer and bid Roman to sit down.

  Roman didn’t sit but said, “Of course I’d gone. I’d been waiting since 4:30.”

  He stared at Svirsky, expecting an explanation. The scrutiny made Svirsky fidget even more.

  “His car broke down,” his wife said.

  “I’m very sorry,” Svirsky said. “I wanted to call but I couldn’t find your number. I was at work; they’d agreed to let me leave early. But the car wouldn’t start. Guys from work tried to fix it; then they called a tow truck. My English isn’t very good and I didn’t understand everything that was happening. The tow truck driver took the car to the garage, but I didn’t want him to. I imagined it would cost a lot to repair. I asked the driver to take it to the parking spot at my building. It was already late then. I called Lyona and he told me to just walk to your house. I hurried, but it took twenty minutes.”

  In the living room the television erupted in loud, idiotic laughter. It put Roman’s nerves on edge, and he shouted for his son to turn it down.

  “Sit,” his wife said.

  Roman squeezed in and sat.

  His wife then called for their son to get up from the sofa and join them in the kitchen.

  “Your father came home,” his wife said, “come over and say hello.”

  His son turned off the television. He rose from the sofa as if it was a great chore. Roman watched him come. When his son had been younger, he’d been athletic. They had enrolled him in soccer in the summer and hockey in the winter. He hadn’t been an exceptional player, but he had enjoyed it. And Roman had enjoyed attending the games. In his own youth he’d been something of an athlete, and he had liked having this in common with his son. But over the last year or so, his son had ceased to show much interest in sports. He’d grown his hair long in a way Roman felt didn’t suit him. His complexion had suffered. He spent more time watching television or in his room reading and listening to music. Though his grades were still good, he seemed lazy and discontent. But when Roman offered a helpful suggestion, his son became sullen and withdrew.

  Upon entering the kitchen, his son took the available seat beside Svirsky.

  “Hi, Pa,” he said automatically.

  His presence at the table seemed to further unnerve Svirsky.

  “I really apologize,” Svirsky said. “Lyona told me not to buy that car. He recommended another. But it was more expensive, and I felt uneasy borrowing more money from him. We’d already borrowed enough. I thought if I bought the cheaper car, it would be easier on Lyona and my sister. They’ve been very generous. But now I know it was a big mistake. I only managed to complicate things.”

  “We all make mistakes.” Roman shrugged.

  His mood was brittle, and for some reason Svirsky’s haplessness aggravated him.

  “I’m very grateful to you for selling me the car,” Svirsky said, and reached into his jacket pocket for an envelope.

  Roman watched him fumble with it and lay it on the table. It was stout with bills.

  “I took out three thousand, like we agreed,” Svirsky said.

  “Okay,” Roman said.

  With the envelope on the table, Svirsky appeared at a loss. Roman sat diagonally from him, but it seemed inappropriate to reach across the table. He expected Svirsky to pass it to him. Svirsky, for some inexplicable reason, continued to hesitate.

  “You haven’t seen the car yet,” Roman said. “We should go outside and I’ll show you the car.”

  “Yes, all right,” Svirsky said. But he remained tentative.

  Roman pushed his chair back and got up. Svirsky, as if still hampered by something, slid his chair back slowly.

  “I don’t doubt you that the car is very good and worth the price,” Svirsky said.

  “I understand,” Roman said, not quite understanding. “But I’m not offended. It’s every buyer’s right to inspect his car.”

  “The thing is,” Svirsky said, “I took out three thousand dollars. And I planned to give it to you, but I didn’t anticipate the charge for the tow truck.”

  So, finally, there it was, Roman thought.

  “How much was the tow truck?” Roman asked.

  “A hundred and fifty dollars,” Svirsky said, penitently.

  Svirsky’s implication was clear and Roman looked around the table to see the reactions of his wife and son. His wife was circumspect, unwilling to provoke. But he could see that his son expected him to do the mean thing, the uncharitable thing.

  “Why don’t you go outside, Edik?” Roman said. “Here are the keys. Take a look at the car. Give me a few minutes to think about it.”

  “Yes, of course,” Svirsky said, and went to tie his boots.

  When Svirsky had gone, Roman looked again at his wife and son.

  “Well, what do you say?” Roman asked.

  “What can I say?” his wife replied.

  “At three thousand dollars, the car is a good price. Maybe we could get more, but for him I didn’t even put it in the newspaper.”

  “It’s hard not to pity him,” his wife said.

  Roman didn’t reply. He allowed for a quiet moment to prevail in which it was possible to consider and pity Svirsky. He wanted to show that he wasn’t blind to the feeling. But as the moment extended, Roman believed it also allowed for a view of the complete picture. In the complete picture, Svirsky couldn’t be considered alone. The complete picture also included themselves, their circumstances, their unpredictable future and the persistent, unwieldy claims of the past.

  Roman rose from the table, went to the window and saw Svirsky sitting motionless in the driver’s seat. His hands were in his lap and the engine was off, as if he didn’t dare touch anything without permission.

  “What’s he doing?” Roman’s wife asked.

  “Sitting,” Roman said.

  It was easy to pity Svirsky, Roman thought. But for all his troubles, Svirsky was actually a lucky man. He possessed something Roman had lost and could never recover. Confused, tired, defeated, Svirsky would still go home to the expectant clamour of his young children. No money, no success, nothing the man attained would ever rival such joy. If he could, Roman would have traded places with Svirsky. He’d have done it in an instant, just to go back to the time when he could speak a word to his son without apprehension. To once more feel from his son a sincere, instinctive desire to be with him. He would do it just to relive the mornings when he drove his son to school. In the same Volvo that he was now selling to Svirsky. He’d do it for those fifteen minutes, when the boy sat buckled in the passenger seat. To see his small face, with its compact intelligence, a source of wonder and pride. And to watch him turn the radio dial and mouth the words to what seemed to Roman like one long, continuous song.

  A New Gravestone for an Old Grave

  SHORTLY BEFORE VICTOR SHULMAN was to leave on his vacation, his father called him at the office to say that Sander Rabinsky had died. From the tone of his father’s voice and from the simple fact that his father had felt compelled to call him at work, Victor understood he was expected to recognize the name Sander Rabinsky and also to grasp the significance of the man’s passing. Not wanting to disappoint his father by revealing his ignorance, Victor held the phone and said nothing. In recent years many of his father’s friends had started to take ill and die. For the most part these were friends from his father’s youth, men whom Victor could not
remember, having not seen them in the twenty-five years since the Shulmans left Riga and settled in Los Angeles. For Victor they existed, if at all, in the forty-year-old photos in which they, along with his own father, appeared bare-chested and vigorous on the Baltic shore. Simka, Yashka, Vadik, Salik: athletes, womanizers and Jewish professionals, now interred in cemeteries in Calgary, New Jersey and Ramat Gan. Victor assumed that Sander Rabinsky was of the same company, although that didn’t quite explain why his death merited a special phone call.

  Sander Rabinsky was dead, which was of course sad, Leon Shulman explained, but there was more to it. Sander had been Leon’s last remaining connection in Riga and the one Leon had entrusted with overseeing the erection of a new monument to his own father, Wolf Shulman. Of late, Leon and Sander had been in constant contact. Sander had been acting on Leon’s behalf with the stonecutter and functioning as liaison with the Jewish cemetery. Leon had already wired one thousand dollars to Sander’s bank, and Sander had assured Leon that a new stone would be installed in a matter of weeks. But now, with Sander’s death, Leon was at a loss. With nobody there to supervise the job, he had no way of ensuring that it would be properly done.

  “Believe me, I know how these things work. If nobody is standing over them, those thieves will just take the money and do nothing.”

  “The cemetery guy and the stonecutter?”

  “There are no bigger thieves.”

  Little more than a year before, Leon Shulman had been forced to retire from the pharmaceutical company where he had worked for twenty-three years. The diabetes that had precipitated his own father’s death had progressed to the point where it rendered Leon Shulman clinically blind. Leon was a very competent chemist, enjoyed his job and was well liked by his co-workers, but he could hardly argue when his supervisor took him aside and began enumerating the dangers posed by a blind man in a laboratory.

  Since then, as his vision continued to deteriorate, Leon imposed a strict regimen upon himself. His friends were dying and he was blind: another man might have surrendered to depression, but Leon informed anyone willing to listen that he had no intention of going down that road. It wasn’t that he had any illusions about mortality; he was a sick man, but sick wasn’t dead. So he woke each morning at a specific hour, performed a routine of calisthenics recalled from his days in the Soviet army, dressed himself, made his own breakfast, listened to the news and then immersed himself in unfinished business. At the top of the list of unfinished business was a new gravestone for his father’s grave.

  On occasion, particularly when the Shulmans observed the anniversary of their arrival in Los Angeles, Leon Shulman would recount the story of his father’s death. Certainly Wolf Shulman had been ill. He’d been ill for years. But the week the Shulmans were scheduled to depart, he had been no worse than he’d been in five years. Just that morning Leon had seen him and the old man had made oatmeal. So there was no way Leon could have anticipated what happened. But still, the thought that he was in a black marketeer’s kitchen haggling over the price of a Kiev camera—albeit a very expensive model, with excellent optics, based on the Hasselblad—while his father was dying was something for which Leon could not forgive himself. And then the frantic preparations for the funeral, and the fact that Leon had already spent all of their money on things like the camera so that they’d have something to sell in the bazaars of Vienna and Rome made the whole cursed experience that much more unbearable. Lacking time and money, Leon grieved that he had abandoned his father, a man whom he had loved and respected, in a grave marked by a stone the size of a shoebox.

  This, Victor understood, was the reason for the phone call to the office. And later that evening, after submitting himself to the indignities of rush hour on the 405 and the 101, Victor sat in the kitchen of his parents’ Encino condominium and listened as his father explained how easy it would be for Victor to adjust his travel plans to include an extended weekend in Riga. Leon had already called a travel agent, a friend, who could—even on such short notice—arrange for a ticket from London to Riga. It was, after all, a direct flight. A matter of only a few hours. The same travel agent had also taken the liberty—just in case—of reserving a room for Victor at a very nice hotel in Jurmala, two minutes from the beach, near bars, restaurants and Dzintari station, where he could find a local train that would get him into Riga in a half-hour.

  “Ask your mother, Jurmala in July, the beach, if the weather is good, nothing is better.”

  “Pa, we live in Los Angeles; if I go it won’t be because of the beach.”

  “I didn’t say because of the beach. Of course it’s not because of the beach. But you’ll see. The sand is like flour. The water is calm. Before you were one year old, I took you into that water. And anyway, you shouldn’t worry. I’ll pay for everything.”

  “That’s right, that’s my biggest worry.”

  When Victor had been a sophomore in college, he realized that he would need to make money. This was the same year he spent a semester abroad at Oxford—though living for three months among fledgling aristocrats had had nothing to do with his decision. For Victor, having grown up in Los Angeles, the lives and privileges of rich people—English or otherwise—were no great revelation. What led to his decision had been the first irrefutable signs of his father’s declining health. It was then that Victor began driving his father to the offices of world-class specialists, experts in the pancreas, not one of whom had been able to arrest—never mind reverse—the advancement of Leon’s blindness. It was then that Victor started to do the calculations that ultimately led him to law school and a position as a litigation associate at a Century City law firm. At nineteen, Victor recognized—not unlike an expectant father—the loom of impending responsibilities. He was the only son of aging parents with a predisposition for chronic illness. His father’s mother had died of a stroke before her sixtieth birthday. His mother’s sister had suffered with rheumatoid arthritis before experiencing the “women’s troubles” that eventually led to her death. And diabetes stretched so far back in his father’s lineage that Leon believed his ancestors died of the disease long before they had a name for it. More than once Victor had joked to friends that, when confronted with forms inquiring after family medical history, he simply checked the first four boxes without looking. (Though, the only reason Victor felt he could permit himself to make the joke was that he was thirty years old, earned $170,000 a year and knew that although he would not be able to spare his parents the misery of illness, he would at least be able to spare them the misery of illness compounded by the insult of poverty.)

  After dinner Victor’s mother, instead of saying goodbye at the doors of the elevator, insisted on walking Victor down to his car. Victor had not committed to going to Riga and she wanted him to understand—if he already did not—the effect his refusal would have on Leon. They both knew that Leon could be obsessive about the smallest things, and considering his condition, this was in some ways a blessing. As he sat at home alone every day, his obsessions kept his mind occupied. He could fashion his plans and make his phone calls. At the university library where Victor’s mother worked, her co-workers all recognized Leon’s voice. Before his retirement he’d rarely called, but now he no longer needed to ask for his wife by name.

  “Of course you don’t know this, but he calls me five or six times a day. Over the last month all the time to consult about the preparations for the gravestone. You know how he is, he says he wants my advice. Should he send Sander all the money at once or half and half ? Do I think he should make up a contract for Sander to sign or would Sander be offended? And then when they started talking about what kind of stone, what shape, what size. Finally, when it came time to compose an epitaph, he says to me, ‘You studied literature.’ There, at least, I think he actually listened to what I said.”

  Standing in the street beside his car, Victor explained again why the trip would be much more complicated than his father imagined. He had only two weeks for vacation. And it wasn�
�t the kind of vacation where he would be in one place all the time. He would be visiting the only close friend he had retained from his time at Oxford. The previous year this friend had gotten married and Victor had been unable to attend the wedding. His friend wanted Victor to meet his wife and spend some time with them. They had been planning this trip for months. Not only had his friend coordinated his vacation to coincide with Victor’s but so had his new wife. They had plans to travel through Scotland, Ireland and Wales. All the travel reservations had already been made. So, it wasn’t that Victor didn’t want to help put his father’s mind at ease, but that there were other people involved and he could not change his plans without inconveniencing them.

  “If you tell them why, they’ll understand. People have emergencies.”

  “I know people have emergencies. But the grave has been there for twenty-five years. All of a sudden it’s an emergency?”

  “For your father it’s an emergency.”

  “If he waits six months, I promise I’ll book a ticket and go.”

  In his mother’s deliberate pause, Victor heard what neither of them dared speak out loud. Leon was careful about his diet, monitored his blood sugar and took his insulin injections. There was nothing to say that he could not continue this way for twenty years. Nevertheless, Victor felt that it was irresponsible, even ominous, to project into the future—even six months—and presume that his father would still be there.

  Meeting his mother’s eyes, Victor knew that the decision had been made. And when his mother spoke it was no longer to convince him but rather to assure him that he was doing the right thing.