A Replacement Life

by Boris Fishman

  He got a promising link. Professor Andrew Morton, Stanford Law School, “a leading authority on Holocaust restitution agreements, appeals, and abuses.” An alliterationist, to add. It was just after nine a.m. in California. He waited to hear what Arianna was doing. She was busy on a call, so he rose and stole off toward the fact-checkers’ library. Out of view in a dim corner, it had been left unrenovated during the makeover. As he was scouring the nooks for Century personnel, he remembered that he had left the search screen up on his desktop and, racing back to his desk, nearly toppled Arianna. “What’s with you?” she said, screwing up her face. “Tell you later,” he said.

  “Professor Morton’s office,” a peppy, young voice said when he finally dialed. It had a proprietary air, its owner charged with guarding the oft-stormed gates of Andrew Morton’s life.

  Slava made himself stop pacing and sit down in a torn armchair. “Professor Morton, please,” he said.

  “And who may I say is calling?” the sun beamed protectively on the other end of the line.

  “Peter Devicki,” Slava said. “From Century magazine,” he added meaningfully.

  “Oh,” she said. Those magic words always parted the doors. “Just a second. It’s Century magazine,” she announced to the professor, as if she’d gotten Slava to call. He mumbled something and they giggled.

  “Hello?” a squeaky voice appeared on the line. “Peter? How can I help?”

  “Devicki,” Slava emphasized. “We’ve got a story about the Holocaust restitutions happening now, and an expert of your stature . . .” He waited, then added cautiously: “More about what if there were a fraud of some kind.”

  “All right,” Morton said.

  “And the main issue is what kind of liability would there be if, you know, someone were inventing the stories that go in those claims.”

  “Has something happened?” Morton said.

  “To whom?” Slava said.

  “You were talking about invented claims.”

  “Oh,” Slava said. “No, no. Strictly hypothetical. We like to cover our bases—you know.”

  “Century,” Morton said bashfully.

  “Century,” Slava said.

  “I grew up reading it, you know. I’d steal it from my father’s shelf because he collected them.”

  You had to give them a moment to fanboy.

  “In any case, the key thing is the money,” Morton collected himself. “Does this person make a profit? Has the bogus claimant been indicted?”

  “I’m sorry?” Slava said.

  “Indicted. Has the bogus claimant been indicted?”

  “Indicted,” Slava repeated.

  “Well, yes,” Morton said. “There’s liability in criminal law. I don’t have the time to go into it now, but it’s money obtained under false pretense. So it’s theft—fraud. Criminal law obtains. The question is, is there a federal or state statute that makes this a criminal liability? Where is this happening?”

  “New York?” Slava said. “If I had to guess. Is there?”

  “I don’t know, Mr. Devicki,” Morton said, amused. “I’m in California.”

  “So, we find out if there’s liability under New York law,” Slava said despondently. Indictment? Criminal liability?

  “Then there’s German law, of course,” Morton went on. “If it’s criminal under German law, there may be a request for extradition. I’m sorry this is so hypothetical. This hasn’t happened, so there aren’t cases to judge from.”

  “Extradition,” Slava repeated. Feebly, he added: “But how can you be beholden to German laws if you’re a citizen—”

  “It’s theft from a foreign government,” Morton said. “You don’t have to be a German citizen to be liable.”

  “I see,” Slava said. He pumped energy into his voice. “This is very useful.”

  “My pleasure,” Morton said. “Not every day Century calls.”

  “One last thing,” Slava said, his finger working a groove in the side of an old wooden bookshelf that held reference books on botany and horticulture. “You Can Lead a Whore to Culture . . .” somebody had handwritten above “Horticulture.” “How would they find out?” he said. “That it’s false?”

  “Every fund has its own verification requirements,” Morton said.

  “Are there records?” Slava said. “From the war?”

  “Very spotty,” Morton said. “The Germans destroyed a lot, and the Russians have always kept theirs close. So it sort of comes down to how persuasive the story is. Whether the facts send up red flags.”

  “I see,” Slava said grimly. “Well, I appreciate your time.” Morton started asking when the article would run, so Slava hung up. He sat motionlessly, then wished he’d asked what Morton meant by red flags.

  “Hey—” Arianna startled him. She was in the doorway to the library, propping the door open with her hip. How long had she stood there? He marveled again at how lovely she was. The fingers as long and slim as pencils, so slender that they were blue by the morning, even though it was a hundred degrees outside. He would rub them between his, twice as thick. “You okay?” she said.

  “Come in,” he said.

  “What are you doing in here?”

  “Come here.” His cell phone was still flashing Morton’s number, ended call. He pulled her neck toward him and kissed her, swiveling her away from the phone.

  “Slava, Avi is heating his lentils around the corner right now.”

  “In the armchair, then.” He pointed to a ratty seat around the corner from a bamboo screen, the Austin Miller Home for the Aged. Austin, an editorial assistant, took a powerful south-of-the-border nap there every afternoon.

  “Stop,” she said. “At home.” She pulled away and straightened her skirt. Reassured that she hadn’t overheard him, he conceded. “I was going for a walk, if you want,” she said.

  He was about to refuse when he thought: Arianna would know something about red flags. She was a fact-checker; it was her job.

  “I do,” he said.

  “You’re actually going to come with me.”

  “You only had to sleep with me.”

  Outside, it was less decisively scorching than the day before. The broom of the seasons was starting to sweep summer under the rug. Emerging into the bright light, they slapped their palms against their eyes. Arianna withdrew large sunglasses from her many-buckled purse. “When I leave this place,” she said, “I’m going to write a novel about editorial staffers who work endless hours and then turn into vampires at night.”

  “Where to?” he said.

  “You choose,” she said.

  “I don’t know how to play this game. I don’t want to just stand here.”

  “We are the only people on this block standing still.” He followed her gaze: The street scrummed around them, itchy and tense. She told him to close his eyes. He was bumped from behind by someone exiting the building, and given a withering look. “Close your eyes,” she repeated, oblivious. He threw up his hands and walked away from the revolving doors, to a sad wall where the building’s smokers congregated.

  “If you just wait for one minute, it’ll come,” she said, joining him.

  “I’m waiting,” he said impatiently.

  “Sometimes it doesn’t,” she acknowledged.

  He rolled his eyes.

  “If I’m with someone who’s impatient and annoying, and it just won’t come, then I close my eyes,” she said. “Then I feel like I am in a van Gogh painting. Everything around is a swirl, and I am a still point in the middle.”

  He lifted a finger and touched her birthmarked eyelid. She flinched, but her eyes stayed closed. The skin of the eyelid was soft and weary. She never wore makeup.

  He saw Mr. Grayson striding out of the elevators, a pack of Merits in his hand like a beacon.

  “Okay, let’s go,” Slava said to her.

  “Where to?” she said, opening her eyes.

  “The park,” he said. “People sit still in the park.”

&nbs
p; “What do you know,” she started to say, but he put his hand over her mouth. She wriggled out and he gave chase. They ran up Sixth Avenue.

  In Bryant Park, Midtown was sweating through salads. Having hoped to spend their lunch hour pretending in a corner that humanity was not, in fact, pressing in all around, the park’s visitors had no choice but to join strangers at the dollhouse café tables dotting the perimeter. For thirty minutes, they sat next to one another, avoiding eyes.

  Slava and Arianna settled onto the grass, still warm in a summer way. Despite being loaded down with a handbag and a wandering skirt, Arianna deposited herself on the ground with a quiet, undemonstrative efficiency. Unspooled against the green, her legs were as pale as plaster.

  “How are you holding up,” she said. “I mean your grandmother. You haven’t really talked about it. Sorry if I’m not supposed to bring it up.”

  He lowered his head onto her thighs. The air was greasy with summer. “In Uzbekistan,” he said, remembering something his grandfather once told him, “when it’s hot outside, they drink hot tea instead of the opposite.”

  “Whenever I ask you about her, you talk about him.”

  He thought about it. “She was sick for six years. She was in a car accident and the blood transfusion was bad. She got cirrhosis from it. Her liver didn’t want to work. All the toxins the liver throws out—they stayed inside. Half the time, she was out of it. Her skin was covered with splotches. They itched her like crazy, she would just about rip the skin off. She had to go to the hospital for hydration all the time. Every other month, then every month, then every week. And through all of this, she didn’t complain. You asked her how she was, and she said, ‘Very good.’ She said it in English, those were the two words she knew, and she said it that way so it could be a joke and you’d laugh and it would take attention away from her. What kind of a person is that?” He looked up at Arianna. “Meanwhile, if my grandfather thinks you’ve forgotten about him for a minute, he’ll remind you. He’s the one who talks. So I know him. I don’t know her. I would like to. I would have liked to.”

  She didn’t say anything, only rested a palm on his chest. He was grateful to her for not saying anything.

  “So what do I have to do now?” he said. “After covering the mirror.”

  “You don’t have to do anything,” she said.

  “But there are rules,” he said.

  She smiled. “There are rules, yes. You mourn for seven days. Which you would be on the tail end of. You sit on low stools.”

  “Why?”

  “So you aren’t comfortable,” she said.

  “So you remember the person.”

  “Yes. People bring food so you don’t have to cook. Company, to get you through the worst time.”

  “It’s pride to think about it directly?”

  “No, I think that would be a Christian problem,” she said. “It’s just painful. In yeshiva, I had a teacher who said, ‘Judaism asks you to be more than yourself and gives you help when you can’t be.’ That’s how I want to live. That’s a merciful God.”

  “I thought he was an angry God,” Slava said.

  “He’s there, too,” she laughed. “In the form of my mother. But you really don’t have to take all of it. You drown in it and you want to run away completely.”

  “That happened to you?” he said.

  “No, but I can imagine it,” she said. She ran her hand inside his shirt.

  “This heat is demented,” he said.

  “August,” she said. “You’re an erotic hallucination.”

  “One of yours?”

  “I wish.”

  A lone trumpeter tooted into a microphone on the stage at the western end of the park. There was going to be a concert later in the day.

  “Do you try to publish them?” he said.

  She shook her head. “It’s for me.”

  “Maybe you’re just shy,” he said.

  “Maybe you’re an exhibitionist.”

  “Do you know what you want to do?”

  “Fact-checking not a persuasive career?” she said. “I don’t know yet. I’m waiting for a sign. I envy you—you know exactly what you want.”

  “It’s brought great triumph.”

  “You’re not patient.”

  “Can you tell me about fact-checking?” he said cautiously.

  “Sure,” she said. “What do you want to know?”

  He shrugged. “Anything. I’ve been sitting next to you a year and a half—I’ve been sleeping in your bed for a week—and I don’t know the first thing about it.”

  “Will you sleep in it this weekend?” she said.

  “Depends how well you answer my questions.”

  She laughed, the white blocks of her teeth gleaming in the sun. “Fact-checking?” she said, leaning back on her palms. “I don’t know. You check the facts in the story.” She shrugged.

  “The piece you’re checking now.”

  “A missing painting at a museum in Italy. But you can’t reach anyone half the time because of their farkakte siestas. Also, ask me if I speak Italian. And Sheila, God bless her, doesn’t remember the curator’s name. But she’s embarrassed to hand in incomplete copy, so she makes it up. Instead of leaving it blank, she makes up the curator’s name. Oh, Arianna will find it. Ask me how many hours I spent this morning hunting down Massimo the False Curator.”

  “But how does it work, you know?” he said. “Like, what sends up . . . a red flag?”

  “A red flag,” she repeated. “Well, they write the story. Or let’s say they report a story. For instance, last week: Lehman Brothers. Company of the decade, blah blah. Simons reports the story. I have to go through the entire thing and underline everything that seems like it could be a fact. And then check it.”

  “But what counts as a fact?”

  “A fact? Mr. Grayson would kill me if he heard me saying this out loud, but—a fact is anything that can piss somebody off by being wrong. That’s why stories about a murder in the forgotten tribe of Waka-waka on the lost island of Wango-dango are actually the easiest check, in a way. Those people don’t read Century. They don’t care if you counted wrong how many stripes of cow dung they have on their faces.”

  “But is there anything you don’t need to check?”

  “Personal impressions. Conjecture. Things that can’t be checked can’t be wrong, you know? If there’s no record, it can’t be checked. I’m sorry—why are you so interested in this?” He couldn’t see her face, but he knew its expression, the way her eyes grew narrow when she was skeptical.

  “I’m interested in you,” Slava said quickly, and leaned up to kiss her.

  –7–

  FRIDAY, JULY 28, 2006

  Israel lived in a grotto-like basement apartment on Quentin Road, across from a Russian grocery and near a squat outer-borough edition of the public library. The living room was through a galley kitchen sheeted with the usual gloomy linoleum. Mailbox-sized packs of saltines and tuna-can skyscrapers peered from dusty cupboards—complimentary provisions from the local synagogue. The same dreck piled in Grandfather’s cabinets, only his home nurses made Ukrainian magic from it. On Israel’s wall was a pharmacy calendar, a bottle of Lipitor reclining suggestively in place of a supermodel. There were four identical calendars from other Russian pharmacies neatly stacked underneath, as if Israel were going to do the year over.

  “My small castle,” Israel said, spreading his arms and stepping into the living room. It was a line from an old Soviet film about a man who returned home to the wrong apartment because the concrete apartment blocks all looked the same, and fell in love with the woman who lived there. Israel was short and round, a pair of dark blue gym trousers keeping the basketball of his belly in place. His face was as seamed as a topographical map, the curved headland of a nose holding the landscape together. It bucked slightly when Slava introduced himself.

  Slava had ignored Israel for a week. His original plan was to ignore him forever. But the week after his
call, instead of combing the Charlotte Observer and the East Hampton Patch, Slava invented three flubs and went to search for his grandmother in the Belarus forest. The night that Arianna had fallen asleep in his bed, his grandmother had come to him. A mercilessly brief visitation, but for forty-five minutes, time had stopped so that he could enter a void and talk with the old woman. As long as he kept writing about Grandmother, Arianna would remain asleep in his bed, the sun would remain banished outside his window, and the city would be kept from reaching the following day. But then the story came to its natural end. That was the mercilessness of a story; you couldn’t keep it going beyond where it wanted to end, even to keep your grandmother alive. So, he wanted to travel with his grandmother once more. However, when he tried to write something about her without intending it as a narrative for the restitution fund, without Grandfather providing the spark of a few truthful details, nothing would come. The story had no purpose, no framework. It made Slava feel wretched; what kind of writer was he if he couldn’t invent on his own?

  On the third day of inaction, he lifted his phone. Israel hadn’t called back, and Slava would have sooner knocked on every door in Brooklyn than ask Grandfather, at whose cavalierness he intended to remain furious. Grandfather had told him that both he and Israel had gone to a Dr. Korolenko. “Korolenko gout knee problems Brooklyn nyc,” Slava typed, and there was the number: 718.

  “Dr. Korolenko’s office, you’re being greeted by Olga.”

  “Hi, Olga. My grandfather asked me to call and confirm his appointment?”

  “Sure. What day?”

  “He doesn’t remember, of course. He thinks it’s next Wednesday or Friday. Definitely not the first half of the week.”

  “His name?”

  “Israel Abramson. Do you see it?”

  “Israel Arkadievich! He’s one of our favorites. But no, nothing in the book for Abramson next week.”