A Replacement Life

by Boris Fishman

  On the phone, Grandfather would want to know when Slava would come visit, but when Slava was there at last, the old man would tiptoe off to the television, Grandmother scowling at him. Then she, too, would become tired and, making apologies, shuffle off to bed, her house shoes scraping the parquet. Slava was left with the home attendant. As the day declined and Grandfather made faces at the television, they would compare notes on his grandparents.

  “Slava?” Mother said now from the other side of the table. “You’re all right?” The skin under her eyes was inflamed.

  “Yes,” he nodded. “Of course.”

  “What are you thinking about?”

  “Nothing.”

  “I wonder if someone will say a toast,” she said resentfully.

  Slava surveyed the table. Grandfather’s call-around had netted all the significant relatives. Uncle Pasha and Aunt Viv; the girls from the pharmacy where his mother worked; the Schneyersons; Benya Zeltzer and clan.

  Even two Rudinskys. The Rudinskys held a special place in Grandfather’s catalog of wayward relations. The Gelmans and Rudinskys had come through immigration together, had been assigned to the same guesthaus in Austria, where their documents were processed, and down the block from each other in Italy, where they were processed some more. Vera Rudinsky and Slava Gelman had played supermarket together. They cut cucumbers out of green construction paper, raised a crop of goose bumps on the skin with black marker, and sold them to their parents for prices just below those of the real vegetable market on Via Tessera. Their parents and grandparents laughed, counting out lira, and when the children were gone to restock the shelves of V&S Alimenti, they made jokes about all the money their children would make in America, followed by wordless glances that said: Together? Maybe together.

  Money works both ways. After arriving in America, Vera’s father had asked Grandfather for a loan to invest in a limo fleet. Grandfather didn’t like to part with money unless he could count on interest, and he couldn’t bring himself to ask that of the Rudinskys, who had shared with the Gelmans months of stateless dread amid the perverse beauty of Mitteleuropa and the Tyrrhenian seashore. The Rudinskys retreated. No scenes; they just called less and less. Grandfather refused to call until called.

  However, the Rudinskys would not disrespect Grandmother’s memory. When the men went off to the secondhand market near Rome to pawn what they’d lugged from Minsk, and the women to the firsthand market to spend on provisions what the men made in the secondhand, it was Grandmother who remained with the children, walking them to the pebbly beach, where they splashed around in the bottle-green Mediterranean water. It was she who supervised the children as they distended their bellies with translucent muscat grapes that looked as if filaments of sun had lodged inside. (Grandmother did not touch the grapes. The grapes, expensive, were for the children.) It was Grandmother who tucked the children to sleep, though she didn’t read stories. She ran her fingers, the skin flimsy and loose, through their hair until they calmed down and dozed off.

  All the same, to indicate displeasure, the Rudinsky high command had sent low-level envoys: Vera had come with her grandfather. The parents (Garik, taxi driver; Lyuba, bookkeeper) had claimed night shifts. It wasn’t enough for Grandfather. Slava watched the old man’s eyes roll past Vera and her grandfather Lazar, a scowl on his lips.

  Slava stared at Lazar. He was stooped as a branch being reclaimed by the ground. In the town near Rome where Soviet immigrants were settled en route to America by some unknown geopolitical contract, Lazar Timofeyevich Rudinsky remained a legend years after the Rudinskys had departed for Brooklyn. The secondhand market was such that people came from Rome itself. Those who had gone through Italy before the Rudinskys and Gelmans sent word about what Italians wanted from their strange interlopers: linen sheets, Lenin pins, cologne, Zenit cameras. Also power drills, cognac, and Red Army caps. Every morning, the Soviet men shrouded themselves in Soviet linens and mongreled into the soft air of Tyrrhenian fall: “Russo producto! Russo producto!”

  Lazar Timofeyevich had an idea. He made rounds of the immigrant homes, inviting the men to the little villa assigned to the Rudinskys. His wife, Ada Denisovna, walked around with wafers and tea. Vera and Slava colored in the next room—V&S Alimenti was working on a new shipment of grapefruit. After the men had finished their tea, Lazar Timofeyevich handed out Italian phrase books. Everyone would memorize—he didn’t ask, he told—basic Italian numbers. Diecimila lire, centomila lire. Whenever anyone looked like he might have a sale at the flea market, an Italian mark ready to spring for a peaked cap or a power drill, one or two of the others would walk over and trot out their new Italian as if they were other customers. Trying to compete with the Italian mark. To drive up the price. Capisce?

  They stood there in a circle, ten sixty-year-old men, rolling their r’s and puckering their fingers like the Italians. Diecimila lire, centomila lire. Va fangul. What else was this fucking life going to ask them to do?

  They made it happen, however. There were a couple of flops to begin with, Syoma Granovsky losing a nice scarf sale because Misha Schneyerson had become so animated that he outbid all the Italians in the crowd. But then they figured it out and everyone’s earnings increased.

  Now Lazar was stooped to the waist. Slava didn’t have to ask about his wife. The homes of Soviet Brooklyn were filled with men who had been left to themselves by the last people to know how much looking after they needed. The men protected their families in a place liable to go berserk on its Jews without notice, and the women protected the men. They died first, leaving the men the most frightening leftovers: life by themselves. They were terrified of being alone. More terrified than they had been of America, more terrified than they had been of the Soviets, maybe even more terrified than they had been of the Germans.

  Next to her grandfather, at the far corner of the other end of the table from Slava, far enough for her words to be lost, though the mascara with which she had burdened her eyelashes would have been visible from across the courtyard, sat Vera Rudinsky. Vera. In Russian, Faith. It was a grown person’s name, which explained why Vera had been so irritated by Slava’s childish pace cutting out paper eggplant for their supermarket. (Finally, she moved Slava to price tags and took cutting out for herself.) An adult in a child—she had been thin as a steeple, her face blue with pallor, as if life had breathed into her only once—Vera was serious, like Slava’s grandmother. Verochka, Verusha—everyone called her by diminutives as if to rub out the age from her name. Ve-ra: the lips shy, then exhaling in wonder. Vera—a wife’s name.

  But Slava could not find that girl in the person who sat across from him, his first sighting in a decade. Little Vera Rudinsky, studious stork, had been replaced by a bronco with long nails and wild hair, the eyes of a hunter for a husband in the Russian classifieds (as Mama looked over her shoulder), though underneath the thick layer of blush on her face, Slava could still make out the unexpectedly felicitous result of Garik and Lyuba Rudinsky, two penguins, mixing genes on some Crimean beach a quarter century earlier.

  Slava closed his eyes. The area behind his chest noised like a beehive. He wanted to go home. He would curl into the blanket and this terrible day would come to an end. And tomorrow, when his story about the explorer came up for judging, maybe there would be good news. He opened his eyes and saw Vera again. Her transformation was so macabre that he could not take his eyes from her.

  Grandfather rose, a small glass in his hand. A moment passed before everyone noticed. Berta burned holes in the foreheads of three Slav neighbors from the floor. The Jews are having a funeral, and you morons are hollering like degenerates. Probably Grandfather had thought it rude not to invite them.

  Finally, the table grew quiet. Televisions from the neighboring apartments howled through the cardboard walls, the wailing heroine of a telenovela mixing with some kind of program about the Russian civil war. “In the name of the Revolution,” a wintry voice said, “I am seizing this train.”

  �
��Some of you may know,” Grandfather said, “twenty-five years ago by now, we were in a car accident. A blue day, blue as . . . I don’t know.” He pointed weakly at Uncle Pasha’s blazer, a bruised blue with white stripes. Grandfather’s free hand moved around the tablecloth, looking for invisible crumbs. “This was in Crimea. She lost a lot of blood, so they gave her a transfusion. Bad blood, as it turned out. Everything that came out of there was bad. It was a ticking bomb you don’t know it’s inside you. Cirrhosis. Well, at least she managed to make it out of there. But, what, it’s better that her headstone is in a language she didn’t know?”

  Berta laid a puffy hand on Grandfather’s wrist. “I know,” he said. “I know. And look—she spoke English. She did. When we had to study for the citizenship . . .” He turned to Slava. “Slavchik, tell it.”

  A table of eyes and half-turned bodies regarded Slava with practiced amusement. He had told this story before. He nodded. “To become a citizen,” he said. He coughed and straightened. He was going to try. “You have to agree to defend the country. No matter your age. It’s called: ‘bearing arms.’”

  People nodded, smiled cautiously.

  “I was thirteen or fourteen,” he went on. He sneaked a glance at Vera. She observed him dutifully but gave no sign of seeing anything other than another table loaded with smoked salmon, fried potatoes, and brightly colored bottles, another meaningless feast, though she would attend them to the last of her days without objection. Slava cursed himself. Vera also he had expected to remain as she was when he left her? He ridiculed his naïveté. Then inspected the lurid creation across the table once more, setting up the small laugh at the end of his story with her in mind. “But I had the best English, so I practiced with her for the interview. ‘Grandmother, will you bear arms for the United States of America?’ She’d make a fist, pump it in the air like Lenin, and shout ‘Yes!’”

  The table broke into careful laughter. Grandfather nodded, permitting amusement, and some people hooted. These were the stories Slava would tell until his own grave—the “bearing arms” story, the story of Lusty Lena and the mulberry bush. This would be the total of Grandmother, as far as her offspring knew.

  “She was better than all of us,” Grandfather said, cutting through the noise.

  “Hear, hear.”

  “The new generation continues our work,” Benya Zeltzer said, repeating an old Soviet slogan. Eyes turned to Slava, to Benya’s hopefully named grandson Jack.

  “What we have been through, may they never,” Benya’s wife said. Arms extended with cognac thimbles, though no one touched rims. Clinking was for celebrations.

  “But remember.”

  “But remember, yes.”

  “You know the expression,” Uncle Pasha said, winking at Slava. “The best way to remember is to start a new generation.”

  Someone whistled. Eyes returned to the young people, marooned in their obviousness. Jack Zeltzer was, what—seventeen? An apron of fuzz hung over his lip.

  Mercifully, the table dissolved in conversation. Uncle Pasha waddled out of his chair and dug his meat-pie hands into Slava’s shoulders. Slava felt the enormous globe of Pasha’s belly at his back. Pasha had the girth of a bureau, but he wore a silk shirt underneath a nice Italian blazer.

  “Slavchik!” He crumpled Slava’s jacket like a piece of looseleaf. The scent of cognac encircled Slava again. Pasha ran a limousine for Lame Iosif and drew from a camouflaged flask of Metaxa throughout the day.

  “Look at you, Slavchik,” Pasha whispered into Slava’s ear, sweat from his upper lip touching Slava’s earlobe. “Shoulders like a boar. The girls jump for you? I bet they jump for you. We don’t need to have the prezervativ conversation, correct? Man or not, too young to be a father.”

  Slava rolled his eyes. “Everything’s in order, Uncle Pasha.”

  Uncle Pasha was Slava’s mother’s second cousin. Pasha drove a large car, tipped well, and wouldn’t let up until he had given attention to every unpartnered woman on a dance floor. Aunt Viv only approved. Smoke machines belching cold mist, strobe lights raiding the dance platform, a heavyset peacock in magenta lipstick belting out hity on the stage (“Yellow, yellow roses! You are mine forever! Yellow, yellow roses!”), and Uncle Pasha doing the elliptical: the guarantees of an evening at Odessa or Volga or Krym, the restaurants where they all got together for birthdays, the last reason they got together with the exception of death.

  “That’s what I like to hear,” Pasha said. “Your aunt and I, we could have waited a little bit.” He pointed a fat finger at Aunt Viv, bulking in swaths of black crinoline decorated with daisies. Her name was Vika—Victoria—but in America, after seeing Caesar and Cleopatra with Vivien Leigh, she had decided that Viv was more glamorous.

  “Maybe she’s no beauty queen now,” Pasha said, “but when she was young? People turned. Not only men. Women. That’s the highest compliment, by the way, when the women notice. Hair like a fire alarm. Used to be, used to be.”

  Slava nodded politely.

  “What I’m saying is?” Pasha said. “Tfoo, you come to say one thing . . .” His jowls jiggled and he scratched at his chin, releasing a belch. “What I’m saying is: Over there you couldn’t work like a normal person.” He pointed at the black window and, beyond it, their former life. “There was no work. They had five people doing one job. Why work? ‘Get yourself noticed, get yourself problems,’ as we used to say. But what we have here is normal? I think America’s next big invention will be how to live without sleep. I am in the limousine five a.m. to nine p.m., and I am not the biggest earner. Your grandfather is always asking me why I don’t come visit. I am in that goddamn car! You think I was this fat back home? I was disc-throwing champion at my high school. Sometimes I ask myself, nu, Pasha, how is the trade? That for this? After all, you know?

  “But look here. When I come home, I see that woman.” A big, hairy thumb pointed to Aunt Viv. She inspected them from the sides of her eyes. Belatedly, Slava realized that it was her lathering that had sent Uncle Pasha into action. “And she sets everything straight. Out there”—now it was America outside the window—“it’s someone else’s. But with her? I’d go into a foxhole with her. She’s one of us. You follow?” The sausage fingers rested inside the black waves of Slava’s hair. “You know what I’m talking about, Slava.” One of Uncle Pasha’s thumbs pivoted inside Slava’s shoulder blade until Slava was staring at Vera. “You’re off taking care of a man’s business, I understand. You think I liked listening to my mother? I went into the Red Army half to get out of that house. Six o’clock in the morning, she’d pull the covers off me. One morning, God bless her, she emptied a vase over my head. But you know what happened when I got into the army? Six in the morning would have been a gift from the skies. How about four-thirty in the morning? And they don’t pour water on you if you stay in bed; they break your legs, especially if you’re a little Yid with a big nose. They’ll take any excuse to give you something to remember them by. I missed my mother a lot in the army. You don’t know what you have until you’ve given it up, like a young idiot. Don’t be an idiot, Slava.”

  Slava didn’t say anything. You just had to let the pitch run its course. Uncle Pasha held Slava’s shoulders like a rudder. They gazed emptily at the strange horizon before them.

  “I have to go to the bathroom,” Slava lied.

  “Slava, Slava,” Pasha sighed. He nodded and kissed his nephew with big blue lips. Then he slapped Slava’s shoulders and walked back to Aunt Viv, the army of love in retreat.

  Slava rose and ducked into the kitchen. He opened the faucet so it looked like he was doing something and watched the water come down, a solid, unwavering cylinder. With a tick of irritation, he noticed another body enter the room.

  “I haven’t seen you in forever,” Vera said in an English swollen by both Russia and Brooklyn.

  Slava looked up at her with a wild, dumb expression. “You remember me,” he said.

  “How do you mean?” she said, confused. �
�You look the same.”

  “You, too,” he rushed to lie.

  She had a round face with long, lined eyelashes, and her black skirt was tighter than you would find in a funeral etiquette book. Slava could see the unstarved ball of her knee behind black panty hose. He felt a warm liquid slosh in his stomach.

  “Your grandmother—” she started to say, then the tips of her nails flew up to cover her mouth, and a second later, she burst into tears. A second after that, she was weeping into Slava’s shoulder, a shudder with each sob. Her palms pressed his shoulder blades, her breasts pressed his chest, and her tears dripped into the shoulder seam of his dress shirt. Frantic, he arched out his ass to put some distance between his groin and her groin.

  She pulled away. “I got mascara all over your shirt,” she said, laughing through the tears. He reached to brush it off, but her fingers closed over his. “No, no,” she said. The cubes of her heels clicked past him. She leaned into the fridge, giving him an uncensored view of her rear end, and withdrew a bottle of seltzer, whereupon she began to dab his shoulder with a paper towel soaked in bubbles. His hard-on retreated.

  “I must look like hell,” she said, and blew her nose into the bubbly paper towel.

  “N-no,” he mustered.

  “She’s in heaven now,” she said through phlegm.

  “Do we have a heaven?” he said. He saw a celestial elevator physically hoisting the deceased.

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “Do I have—” She pointed at her eyes.

  “No, it’s fine,” he said. She was an expert dabber.