A Replacement Life

by Boris Fishman

  “You’re too depressed to go outside, you’re playing matchmaker?”

  “I get done what I need. So what, you called to ask how your grandfather is?”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I’m a couple of days older than you. You want another name.”

  “And what makes you think that?”

  “Because you’re my grandson,” the old man said with satisfaction.

  “And a grandson of yours—”

  “Takes opportunity by the balls.”

  “What is the opportunity here?” Slava said. He didn’t hear an answer and asked again.

  “Helping people,” Grandfather said.

  “Your specialty,” Slava said.

  “Yes, my specialty,” he mocked Slava. “Oh, hike up your skirt already. You’re flirting a little too long. Do you want a name or not?”

  Now Slava made him wait. “Yes,” he said finally.

  “Then why all the foreplay? Some of us have a limited time on earth. Go out with Vera tonight, I’ll give you a name tomorrow. Just let me know if I have to call you at her apartment.” He started laughing wickedly. “I was your age, she’d be old news already.”

  “I don’t need you,” Slava said without conviction. “I’ll ask Israel. He’ll give me names. Your neighborhood is full of people who want money for free.”

  “Do it,” Grandfather said. “Just watch you don’t say something to the wrong person.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I have to go, cucumber,” Grandfather said.

  “That’s what Grandmother called me. Don’t call me that.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said, grave all of a sudden. They were quiet while they waited for the ill feeling to dissipate. It was impossible to escape each other. Other people could throw down the phone, move to another part of the country, change their names, but Grandfather and Slava were sealed to each other like a husband and wife. They were married in the old way, without release. They would be vicious toward each other, wait till the burn settled, start in on each other again. They were deathless.

  “Your grandmother would have walked under a tank for you,” Grandfather said. “And that’s the kind of girl Vera is. One of ours. A girl who will think of you first. But no kind of stupid cow, either, painting her nails all day. She’s got a salary, an apartment.”

  “Is it you’re too proud to make peace yourself?”

  “You don’t know anything,” Grandfather hissed. Slava saw the spittle flying from his gold teeth on the other end of the line. It was the face Grandfather had worn when he cut up that man in Minsk fifty years before, a face Slava had been sheltered from.

  “Fine,” Slava said. “Give me a name.”

  “What do you think, I’m a two-year-old?” Grandfather said, pleasant again. “Date first, name tomorrow. Good luck, Don Juan.” And with that, he hung up.

  Vera called shortly after Slava had hung up with Grandfather, as if Grandfather had given a signal. The grandfather arranged it:

  Slava’s grandfather to Vera’s grandfather: “He wants to go out with Vera tonight, but can she call him? He doesn’t want to impose.”

  Vera’s grandfather to Vera: “Slava wants to join you, but this one’s shy, apparently. You have to ask him.”

  Vera to Slava: “What are you doing, Slava? Grandfather gave me your number. I started telling my friends about our Italian adventures. They want to meet you.”

  Vera wore an amber-colored leather jacket over a cowl-necked blouse and jeans over black heels that narrowed to fine points. They clopped like hooves down the steps of her apartment building. Her hair, swept up into a wave captured mid-crash, and her eyelids, fatigued with ultramarine shadow, sparkled with synonymous gloss, lending a wanton appearance to a face that seemed still young and unformed.

  “Where are we going?” he said. “You look nice.”

  “Thank you, Slava,” she smiled. “Avenue I. By the banya.”

  “We can take the F,” he said.

  “No, no, taxi,” she said. “Call, please?” She reached into her purse and handed Slava a card. “Ask for Vova.”

  Vova was a former cruiserweight, the span of his hands nearly the size of the steering wheel. A crew cut crowned the square of his head.

  “Where tonight, Verochka?” he said when the young people were piled into the backseat.

  “Avenue I. Lara’s,” she said.

  “I’ll be taking you back?” Vova said.

  “Yes, please.”

  “Just call when you’re ready.”

  They rode in a festive silence, the streets slick after a brief, indecisive rain.

  “Your friend, does he speak?” Vova said finally.

  “I’m sorry, Vovochka,” Vera said. “It was rude not to introduce him. Tell Vova something about yourself, Slava.”

  “I work at a magazine,” Slava croaked.

  “One of ours?” Vova inquired. “A fitness magazine?”

  “An American one,” Vera said proudly.

  “An American one!” Vova smacked his lips. “Important people in the car, it turns out. That gives you enough bread, working at a magazine?”

  “I’m thinking about driving a taxi,” Slava said. He hated these Russian men whose kingdoms were the size of their taxicabs.

  Vera elbowed Slava and gave him a cold look. With shame, he remembered that her father drove a taxicab. However, his comment had the intended effect of diminishing the cruiserweight’s interest in further conversation.

  They pulled up at a building that looked just like Grandfather’s—brick, an arched entryway wearing too many layers of paint. Slava hadn’t realized young Russian people continued to live in these neighborhoods even though they were old enough to live wherever they wanted. They sat in the car until Slava realized he would be paying. “And how much?” he inquired.

  “Ten,” Vova sighed.

  Slava was about to pass thirteen dollars to the front seat when Vera’s eyes sent out an ultramarine blast of distress. Her hand reached into his wallet and removed another five. Speechless, Slava passed eighteen dollars to the front seat.

  “He takes care of me,” she said vaguely as they walked into the fluorescent embrace of her friend’s building.

  The guests were in their midtwenties, everyone paired up, and they spoke Russian, normally distressing to Slava, but his had been receiving an unfamiliar workout in recent weeks. Slava stood to the side while Vera exchanged elaborate, lippy greetings with her friend Lara and Lara’s boyfriend, Stas.

  “Everyone?” Vera said, taking Slava by the arm and walking him into the living room. His discomfort retreated slightly, her hand warm and familiar. “This is Slava. Slava is a writer.” The assembled brayed in admiration. “He works at the best American magazine.”

  “Playboy?” said a potbellied young man in a blazer. The other boys laughed. The girl whose arm was entwined with his laid a free fist into his gut.

  “That’s Leonard and his Galochka,” Vera said. “Leonard is our resident literario. You guys will have something to talk about. That’s Lyova, that’s Oslik. Everyone, introduce yourselves and make Slava feel at home, please. Girls, let’s go set the table.”

  His girlfriend rising, Leonard shook his poetic curls and patted the freshly vacated seat next to him. There were half a dozen boys altogether, drinks in their hands.

  “What are you drinking?” Leonard inquired.

  “Vodka?” Slava proposed.

  “Incorrect!” Leonard announced, and the boys squealed with laughter. He was their ringleader, by the look of things. Each of their glasses held a caramel-colored liquid. “Galina Mikhailovna, my dove!” Leonard called out toward the kitchen, using his girlfriend’s patronymic, the way wives and husbands did in the old times.

  Galochka, who was setting a plate of herring in oil on a lacy tablecloth, looked up. The girls were working with daunting facility. One was setting the table with gold-rimmed plates, another following with filigreed thimbles,
and a third unloading bowls of salad Olivier and boiled potatoes. Slava wished he could be in their circle instead. Vera caught his eyes and mouthed, Everything okay? Embarrassed, Slava nodded.

  “Dove, get our guest a glass of cognac, would you?” Leonard bleated.

  “I’ll take care of it,” Vera whispered to Galochka, and moved to open one of the bottles.

  “So what kind of writer are you?” Leonard turned back to Slava. “I read a lot. Unlike the rest of these knuckleheads. John Grisham, James Patterson. Suze Orman is very good. Last year, I read The Count of Monte Cristo.”

  The rest of the boys nodded reverently.

  “Why do they call you Oslik?” Slava said tentatively to a skinny boy in jeans and a sweatshirt. “Oslik” meant “donkey.”

  “Oslik?” Leonard answered for him, grinning. “Oslik!” he said, and brayed. “Why do we call you Oslik?”

  “I don’t have an elevator in my building,” Oslik said, sniggering. “We came back from shopping one day and had to carry it all the way to the fifth floor.”

  “Like a donkey!” Leonard said.

  Oslik laughed with everyone else.

  “If Oslik thinks I am going to marry him in these conditions,” said a short, bulbous girl who was helping to set the table, “he’s severely mistaken.” Everyone laughed again.

  “Boys!” Vera shouted. “Positions, please! The table’s almost ready. Leonard, please pour? Girls, who’s drinking what? Vodka for me.”

  While everyone was trooping toward the table, Slava’s cell phone rang. He had opened it by the time he realized he shouldn’t have: It would be Grandfather requesting an update. He’d stand over you counting thrusts if you let him.

  “Hey,” Arianna said. “You’re somewhere.”

  Slava froze. After too long without speaking, he dashed to a corner of the living room. “Funeral,” he blurted out.

  “What?” she said.

  “The shiva?” He worked with what he had given himself. “We’re trying it out. Like you said.”

  “Oh—okay. It’s only the seven days after—Oh, it doesn’t matter. Good for you. Okay, no problem. I’m sorry to interrupt. Tell everyone my condolences. From your work friend.” She laughed quietly.

  “But what was it?” Slava said. Looking up, he saw Vera observing him skeptically. He realized he was wedging himself into a corner, his hand covering the phone. He straightened, as if talking to no one other than Grandfather.

  “A club, a band,” she said. “No big deal.”

  “That works well for us,” Slava said, trying to sound casual.

  “Sla-va! Everything’s ready,” Vera shouted in English. Several people behind her whooped, laughter following. Slava looked at her hatefully.

  A long, stinging pause on the other end. Then Arianna said: “I should run.”

  “Hold on—”

  “I’ll see you on Monday, okay?” she said, and hung up.

  Slava cursed himself. Then Vera. Then himself. Vera called for him again.

  When everyone had sat down and the thimbles had been filled by Leonard’s pink hand, Vera raised her glass.

  “The hosts, Verochka, are supposed to raise the first glass,” Leonard said.

  “Leonard,” Lara hissed. “You know I don’t mind. Vera is like a sister.”

  “Thank you, Larochka,” Vera said. “This one’s been reading The Count of Monte Cristo too much, with his table etiquette.” Everyone laughed as Leonard frowned, and Slava understood that Vera was the only person at the table permitted to contradict him. “I would like to welcome Slava to our table,” Vera went on in Russian. “And I would like to say a word in honor of Slava’s grandmother, who passed away a week ago. A proud woman and a strong woman. I remember her from when I was a little girl. She was so kind, but you never messed with her!”

  Again, the table laughed. Oslik slapped the table. “For grandmothers!” he announced.

  “Babushka, oh, babushka,” Leonard recited with cautious dreaminess. His tone meant that the words were coming from a poem. He was hoping to regain the upper hand of the conversation. Everyone turned to him, but he couldn’t recall the remainder of the lines. “Something, something!” he rescued himself, and everyone laughed.

  “Slava, what’s it like to be at a Russian table?” Vera said as everyone drank. “Different from your American friends?”

  “It’s very intimate,” Slava said, hoping that he was providing the response she wanted.

  Everyone burst into hysterical laughter, Leonard’s eyes gleaming with his now indisputable restoration to the crown of the male pyramid. Vera laid a hand on Slava’s arm. Slava felt her breath on the edge of his earlobe. “Intimno is for the bedroom only,” she said in Russian. “At a table like this, you say it’s very warm, or close.”

  Slava bulged his eyes for the benefit of the group. The laughter redoubled. Then Slava laid a hand on Leonard’s forearm and made flirty eyes. Oslik was so gratified that he had to pull his chair back from the table so he could double over.

  “To Slava!” Oslik said. “To Slava!” all of them echoed, even Leonard, slapping Slava’s back so hard that Slava nearly spat out a piece of herring.

  “So we were promised stories about Italy,” Lara said after everyone had settled down.

  “Let’s eat,” Slava tried to encourage everyone.

  “Come on!”

  “The bourgeois look to the past and the proletariat looks to the future,” Slava said, thinking a Soviet slogan might divert them, but he bungled part of it.

  “I remember,” Vera said in Russian, looking at Slava, “Slava’s family had finally been called to the consul. For the interview if you were going to be let into America. And nobody speaks one drop of English. But you can’t have a seven-year-old boy answering. So they all stumble how they can, and then the consul asks, ‘Why do you want to go to America?’” She said this last part in English. “And nobody understands him. Moments like this—I mean, you know—enough to kill the application. Because they are rejecting people already by this time. Go to Israel, they say.

  “And Slava understands, but how can he answer? So he says, ‘I want to meet my aunt Frida.’ And the consul laughs. And everyone laughs. And meanwhile, his mother or father—who was it, Slava?—understands. Because they practiced this answer, you know. ‘Why do you want to emigrate to America?’ Svoboda. And how do you say svoboda?”

  “Freedom!” the table shouted.

  “How do you remember the word?”

  “Aunt Frida!” the table shouted as one.

  “And so after Slava said ‘Aunt Frida,’ one of them remembered and said, ‘Freedom.’ And they passed. You can say that without him, his family wouldn’t be here.” She beamed proudly.

  The table whooped and rocked with applause. “To Slava!” Oslik whooped. “To Slava!” everyone shouted. Slava gave in and smiled sheepishly. Thimbles knocked his, splashing cognac onto his wrist, palms kneaded his shoulders, and Leonard launched into the “Marseillaise.” Next to him, Vera shone with a thousand lights.

  Three hours later, a final piece of herring gleaming undesirably in a small lake of oil and a pack’s worth of cigarettes crushed into a porcelain ashtray, the group had switched positions. The boys were at the table, finishing the cognac, and the girls were smoking on the couch. Leonard’s blazer clung limply to the back of his chair. He had unbuttoned the upper two buttons of his shirt and hung his arm across Slava’s shoulder, as if the two of them had served under Kharkov together. Now and then Slava heard his name in the circle of girls and peered over Leonard’s Pushkinian curls to make out what was being said. It was difficult because Leonard was breathing heavily into his temple. Slava looked at Vera, who looked at him, as if she came equipped with a device that alerted her every time he wanted her attention. She nodded and smiled.

  Leonard’s girlfriend, Galochka, wandered over to Leonard and Slava. “Popochka,” she said to Leonard. Little butt. “You’re done eating?” She wedged herself into his lap, eli
citing a grunt. “I’m going to feed you until your belly is so big no other woman will want you. And then you’ll be all mine.”

  Leonard turned to Slava. “Who said women don’t speak directly?” He turned to Galochka: “Dove, please, we’re speaking.” Galochka pecked Leonard’s forehead and removed herself to the couch.

  “How long have you been together?” Slava asked, to ask something.

  “I don’t know,” Leonard said, squinting with overfed eyes at the clock. “Our parents have medical offices next to each other.”

  “I see,” Slava said. Leonard downed two fingers of cognac and gazed contemplatively at the wall. “What specialty?” Slava said dutifully.

  “Gastro?” Leonard said absentmindedly. “Mine are gastro, hers are feet. You and Vera?”

  “We just met again,” Slava said.

  “She’s special,” Leonard said.

  “That’s what everyone says,” Slava said. “We haven’t really spoken. She clears my plate and runs off.”

  Leonard tried to focus on Slava through the drink in his eyes. “She doesn’t want to interrupt.”

  “What, this?” Slava said.

  “You know what?” Leonard said. “You’re okay, Slava. You know why?” He stuck out his fingers—Slava was startled by the gold band on his left hand; he and Galina couldn’t be over twenty-five, but they were married—and counted. “One, you don’t run your mouth. You observe. It’s a gift. People talk too much. They like to hear themselves talk. And two, when Vera said famous Slava was coming, I’ll be honest—I’m drunk, so I’m honest—I thought, This guy is going to be a fucking prick. And you are a prick, a little bit. You think you are better than us. But you’re all right. I like you.”

  Despite himself, Slava smiled. Leonard—sloping belly, puffy fingers, the face starting to line—was already a little version of the man he would be in thirty years, to him an achievement. Some questions—America, but a distinctly Russian America; Galina; the medical office he would inherit from his parents—he had answered and would never have to be asked again.