But Sofia loved to dance. She had to be more careful nowadays, with no father or brother or mother to look after her, and men back from the war with a hollowed-out look in their eyes and a hunger that even a woman’s hand paled beside. So she danced by herself or with a female friend. That was the concession Galina had managed to extract from her wild younger sister; Sofia would go to the dances only if accompanied by Rusya, the Slav girl next door, who joked to Galina with her characteristic coarseness, “You don’t mind your sister dead if the walls crumble, so long as she doesn’t get raped?” But Rusya went along, and twirl she and Sofia did, casting longing glances at the army captains back from the front in their uniforms, and at the neighborhood boys, who in the span of four years had become men. There was Misha Surokin, the half-moon of a scar running down the right side of his face; and Yevgeny Gelman, the hooligan from Sofia’s neighborhood, looking as unserious as she remembered him; and Pavlik Sukhoi, a facial tic he had acquired in the war making him wince twice a sentence. They were the same but not the same.
And so when the waltz started up on this Saturday night, it was Sofia and Rusya, approximating the moves best as they could from the films they had seen before the war, imagining themselves in some grand castle in Austria, switching up the lead every minute or so, Sofia pretending strict indifference toward the men leering from the perimeter of the dance club, Rusya sending them coquettish smiles.
But it was Sofia whom the men were looking at, unblemished skin and two ponytails like cables—Rusya had been blessed with a farmer’s fearlessness but also a farmer’s face. During a break for boysenberry punch (no alcohol was served, which meant the men had to sneak it in flasks and seltzer bottles, going outside for swigs out of respect for the women), while Rusya was distracted by a bowlegged lieutenant, one of the army captains wandered over to Sofia.
It was as the rule has it: It’s the brave ones who get the girl, and bravery has nothing to do with looks; they had the courage to approach. Captain Tereshkin had one such plain face, his chin fading imperceptibly into his neck, halfhearted stubble crowning his jowls. No matter the searing July heat, even starved evacuees sporting healthyish tan glows, Tereshkin was as pale as snow. Who knows what overtook Sofia in that moment; we nurture our defenses, and in a moment of consequence, they simply don’t show. Maybe she wanted to feel a man’s arms around her; maybe she felt sorry for Tereshkin, because probably he was motherless, sisterless, childless; maybe she simply got tired of saying no. All she knew was that she was dancing the next dance with him, a Rosner jazz tune, Rusya all eyes at her lieutenant, whose own eyes were beginning to wander. Even Sofia, busy with Tereshkin, could see that.
When the curfew bell rang—it was ten o’clock, things still on edge—Captain Tereshkin asked if he could escort Sofia home. It was dark, barely any functioning streetlamps. Maybe that was all he wanted, a gentleman, and Galina would be home in case he tried to push his way in. The way there was long, however, and Sofia wasn’t about to take chances. She had danced with him, yes, but because a woman danced with a man, that meant she had to thank him with her body? All the same, she didn’t want to insult the captain—because she had danced with him all evening, because maybe he had meant nothing by it, because she was a little bit scared. That was when the idea came to her. She disliked it almost as much as she disliked the idea of having pale-faced Captain Tereshkin accompany her home, and she minced in place, smiling dumbly at Tereshkin while she tried to think of something else. But nothing else would come—her cleverness tended to abandon her these days, as if she had used up her life’s allotted supply during the war, staying alive. What a pitiful amount she had been granted, she thought. It hadn’t been enough to save anyone but her and her sister. All these thoughts—comically, stupidly—flashed through her mind. Oh, Captain, she thought, if only you knew what you were taking on—an orphan with one dress between her and her sister, because the rest of their clothes, given them by the Red Cross, had been stolen and pawned by the Belarusian collaborator who continued to occupy half their home. Sofia wore it now, not so much a dress as a sarafan, the kind of thing her mother wore before the war to clean the house.
Finally, Sofia excused herself to go to the bathroom, which meant the bushes outside, but the bushes outside would take her past Zhenya Gelman, laughing with his friends in a circle and taking swigs from a bottle with no label, too late in the evening to bother with outside.
Zhenya Gelman was known in the neighborhood. What he was known for was another story. “A child of other people’s gardens,” people called him before the war. A hooligan, not to say a criminal. He got what needed to be got, whether it was beets from old Ferbershteyn’s garden or a set of silver spoons from God knows whom, and you could do yourself a favor by not worrying how.
Sofia was glad to see Zhenya alive, as glad as she would have been for a brother, but she had nothing to do with boys like him before the war, and she would have less to do with them now. Boys like him would be in prison before they turned twenty. Even as she approached him that night, her mind ran with what else she could do, but she had nothing. Her mind was like a still clock. She was impressed with herself for coming up even with this. Besides, Zhenya had a girlfriend. He had ten girlfriends. Maybe he wouldn’t want anything from her in return.
She stood behind him for nearly a minute before his friends noticed her and their expressions changed. He spun around. “Sofia Dreitser,” he observed, the smile on his face hanging awkwardly.
“Can I talk to you?” she said.
A couple of chuckles followed from the boys behind him, but he half turned and the laughter fell from their faces. Zhenya and Sofia stepped to the side. He placed his hand on her shoulder and leaned in solemnly, but she gave him such a look that his hand returned to his side.
“There’s a captain over there,” she started.
“Tereshkin,” he said.
Her eyes opened wide in surprise.
“The eyes of a reconnaissance man!” Zhenya said with his usual self- regard.
Quite a comment to make, considering Zhenya had been evacuated out east, then had the age on his identity card revised down until the war was nearly over, then, when finally drafted, had finagled his way onto a ship in liberated territory as a radio operator. Zhenya Gelman knew as much about radio operation as she did, but how to get to safe places when the world around him was ending, that he knew how to do better than anyone.
“Let me guess,” he said. “The captain wants to take you home.”
She blushed and looked down.
“You know, you look like a just-hatched chick in that sarafan of yours,” he said.
“Thank you very much, Zhenya,” she said angrily.
“And so you came to Zhenya the thug to help you out of your bind,” he said. “Not a word for me when things are hopping along, but when trouble comes . . .” The sentence was half out of his mouth when he realized what he was saying, the idiot, her entire family in the ground and she didn’t even know where. When it came time to liquidate the Minsk orphanage, the Nazis walked the children into a giant hole in the earth and covered their living bodies with sand. They tossed candies to them as their tiny hands reached out for help. That was what the Nazis did to children. So she hoped her parents and her grandfather had been merely shot. She didn’t know how they had died, which was what made her nights endless, but if it was known, it was known only in some army or KGB office, and those places she hoped never to see.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Come with me.”
“Zhenya,” she said, “I am grateful to you for the help. But I can’t thank you. You understand what I mean.”
“You’ve already insulted me once,” he said. “Don’t insult me twice.”
When Captain Tereshkin felt an arm around his waist, he brightened, thinking it was Sofia’s; the smile changed to surprise when it turned out to belong to Zhenya Gelman, “a child of other people’s gardens,” someone who was known to the neighborhood, and known to hi
m, Tereshkin having grown up several blocks away.
“Captain!” Zhenya yelled. He took Tereshkin’s hand in his. “I have to pour you a glass.”
“W-why?” Tereshkin said.
“Because you’ve kept my lady company all night long. It was a gentlemanly thing to do—never let a lady stand alone. So I owe you. What do you drink? You know I specialize in Armenian cognac.”
Tereshkin turned red as a sugar beet. He had half a dozen years on Gelman, and their bodies were of similar cast, but Gelman had boxed before the war, and in any case, you didn’t fight with Zhenya Gelman.
“Zhenya,” he said, his face falling. “I’m sorry. I had no idea. Really. You have to believe me.”
“But that’s what I’m saying!” Zhenya said. “You’re a good man, and I want to thank you.” Zhenya practically made him drink the cognac. They sucked on the same piece of lemon afterward, Zhenya gallantly giving Tereshkin first taste. They toasted the motherland, then the women around them. There were no women like Russian women. Russian women were made from freshly milked milk, and the rest of the world’s women from water. It didn’t matter were they Jewish or not—Zhenya couldn’t resist forcing the captain to agree with this notion. Russian women were chocolate, like the loam under their feet; they were the butter that went on their bread; the red poppies that swayed in the wind. To Russian women!
“It seems I should walk my girlfriend home, don’t you think?” Zhenya said to Sofia after Tereshkin had freed himself from Zhenya’s clutches and, pleading curfew, run off. Zhenya winked. Already he had acquired somewhere a gold tooth, as was the fashion.
“I don’t know if your real girlfriend would appreciate that,” Sofia said.
“Who’s that?” he said.
“Oh, you can’t keep them straight,” she said. “Ida. Or whatever her name is.”
“Ida?” he said, his eyebrows rising. “I ditched Ida like a sack of potatoes. I asked her to join tonight. She says: ‘My teeth hurt.’ How do you like that? I was gone like a comet. Sparks coming out from under my feet. You could light a cigarette off my boot heel. Her teeth hurt!”
“Ida.” Sofia smirked. “Ida, whose father distributes beer and vodka for the whole city. Millionaire Ida. You ditched her.”
“I ditched her,” he said proudly.
“Well, even I’m impressed,” she said.
“So, what do you say?” he said. “It’s insulting that I have to say it, but I got nothing in mind. I just want to see you home safe. We lived fourteen houses from each other before the war. We’re practically family.”
“How in the world do you know how many houses we lived from each other?”
“Because I counted,” he said.
Sofia was right about one thing, though only partly. Zhenya did go to prison, but it wasn’t before he turned twenty; he was already twenty-one. Several years after the dance, they were returning from another dance club with friends when they heard from the other side of the street: “Look at those kikes! Would have been nice to have some of that energy at the front, kikes!” She said sternly, “Zhenya, no,” but he was already crossing. It wasn’t because he was drunk; he would have done the same thing if he had been sober, as he would for the rest of their lives, so while she never knew whether her husband would end his day in her bed or a prison cell, she always knew that it would be without lost pride. Zhenya carried a straight razor for occasions exactly like this one. He cut up the fellow pretty bad. Zhenya’s father bribed the judge, so he got only a year instead of three. They were starting to build the soccer stadium around that time, so that was how he repaid his debt to society. Though Zhenya never mentioned it to his grandson Slava, his own hands had poured the concrete for the seats where they sat every week, shouting after Gotsman and Aleinikov.
Sofia Dreitser waited faithfully until Zhenya Gelman was released from prison. Her worst imaginings about him had come true, but once Sofia Dreitser devoted herself to something, she didn’t let go. Zhenya Gelman knew how to get to a safe place when the world around him was ending. And he still had his family, with the exception of his older brother, who had been killed in the war—a large, noisy, argumentative family that took her in the way a wave takes in a body. She wanted these things, and most days that equaled out to she wanted him.
So she ordered her own pride back and waited patiently, faithfully, for his return from prison and welcomed him home with his favorite meal, lamb cutlets and “mashed potatoes in the cloud style,” so called by him because they were as airy as clouds, and all without butter. She waited until she became Sofia Gelman; until they produced Tanya Gelman; until Tanya met Edik Shtuts, such a different man from her own husband; until Tanya and Edik produced Vyacheslav Gelman, though she, Sofia, called him Slava for short; until they left the place that was soaked with the blood of her family for a place that meant nothing to her except what it would do for her grandson, for whom she had lived since the moment she had approached Zhenya Gelman at the Spartak Dance Club in 1945 and said can you help.
When Slava abandoned Brooklyn, he bought a small notebook, intending to keep it filled with details about his grandmother’s life. That was how he would remain close to her. The problem was that he didn’t know a great deal about Grandmother’s life. Even when she was well, she regarded her personal history as one regarded a tragic mistake. Some people can’t stop working over their tragic mistakes—Slava was this type of person; he turned over in his mind endlessly the mystifying details of his failures at Century—but other people prefer to live as if their tragic mistakes never took place. Slava’s grandmother was this kind of person. She wanted to know whether Slava had finished his homework; whether he had a girlfriend; whether he had enough to eat: She could make a poached carp that lasted for a week. Slava’s life seemed insignificant next to hers, and he felt hot shame in regaling her with what girl had said what to him at school, but Grandmother followed his words with such transport that her lips followed his as he spoke.
With everyone else, Grandmother was prim, unforgiving, impermeable. Even as a young man, Grandfather whined about aches in his chest, aches in his legs, aches in his head; this irritated Slava’s grandmother. She glared at her husband as if at a child, embarrassed and angry.
So Slava took advantage of their connection and, in high school, invented a ruse. He pretended that for history class, he had been assigned to extract a family story, for a pastiche on the personal histories of the class. No such thing had been assigned—Slava’s teacher, Mr. Jury, was a red-nosed tippler who gave out class-long assignments and napped in his chair—but Grandmother wouldn’t dare cost Slava a good grade. “What can I tell you, cucumber?” she said. “Tell me why you call me that,” he said. “‘Cucumber’” she said. She smiled shyly; she didn’t know; she had never thought about it. “Tell me about the war,” he pressed cautiously. She smiled again and began, “Well . . .” The sentence ended there. Her tongue moved but no words emerged. He wanted to say, Tell me because I’d like to tell my grandchildren one day. Tell me because it happened to you, and so I should know. Tell me because it will bring me closer to you, and I want to be close to you. But he was fifteen years old, and he didn’t know how to express thoughts like these. He only knew that he wanted to know. He could tell that she would tell him anything but anything, only if he could stand it please don’t make her talk about that. And though he grasped how important it was for him to know—even if everyone in the family had acquiesced not to trouble Grandmother about it—he couldn’t bring himself to make her. So he said to her: “Forget about the war. Tell me about how you and Grandfather fell in love.”
He wrote out the Spartak Dance Club story in his little notebook days after he decided not to go to Brooklyn again. His family had yet to understand what was happening, though his mother was already beginning to leave messages on his answering machine, first hectoring, then begging, then feigning poor health, then feigning good news, then claiming to need advice, then loudly giving up. But Grandmother understood wh
y he had to disappear, he reassured himself. Even though she never called, somehow she understood, if only because she believed that everything he did was blameless and true.
But the story of how Grandmother and Grandfather fell in love was the only story that Slava had. He traced and retraced its slender collection of details, his pocket notebook as overlarge for the few facts it contained as a widower’s bed for its revised list of occupants. He could have expanded its contents, it occurred to him once, by inventing or imagining something—the house Grandmother came from, the way the few working streetlights shone over her and Grandfather’s heads on their way back to her house. Hadn’t Slava invented a ruse to make her tell the story in the first place? But all that felt shameless now that he no longer saw her. On the pages of his notebook was the truth, and it would be impaired if he invented around it. He wasn’t going to lie the way Grandfather did, the way they all had to. His mother had earned the valedictorian slot at Belarus State, but the honor was given to the number two person, a Slav, because how could you have a Jew at the top; Belarus State admitted only two Jews per thousand, and one of them was going to win valedictorian? Invited to say something at the ceremony, a silver medal around her neck, Slava’s mother had merely smiled into the microphone and said: “I want to thank the committee . . .”
Stories like these, Slava had too many of. They went around the dinner table with no difficulty. For every story that his grandmother refused to tell, Slava’s grandfather told three. He could talk until morning. The usual dinner talk when they all lived together—shopping lists, doctors’ appointments, even Slava’s doings—bored Grandfather, and he would slink off to make eyes at the television. However, if the conversation touched something from their Soviet life, his eyes would quicken and he would launch into a ceaseless description. These stories were without beginning or end, without the context that would have helped his listeners remember who was who, how things worked. Despite trying his utmost, inevitably, Slava lost the thread, feeling like a failure because he was letting gold slip away in a fast-moving river. But his inadequacy with the details left him free to observe how Grandfather told stories, like a rushing river, indeed. On zakhlebyvalsya. He was choking on everything he wanted to say.
A Replacement Life Page 5