“You’re a charming prick, too,” Slava said.
“Good.” Leonard’s face broadened in pleasure. “Let’s drink to our women.” He reached for the bottle again.
“Galina is driving?” Slava said.
Leonard brought a finger to his lips and winked. Then his teeth closed around the bottle stopper. He extracted it with his mouth and spat it across the table.
“You savage!” Galina shouted from across the room. “I’m not taking you to the dentist when you ruin your teeth.”
“Get up, get up,” Leonard counseled Slava, a bottle in one hand and a Slava in the other. Everyone looked up from their positions. Leonard made eyes at Oslik, who immediately sprang from his seat and dashed for the stereo. A Russian pop song emerged from the speakers. “Opa!” Leonard shouted, swigged from the bottle, and gave it to Slava, who held it at his side. “Drink, drink,” Leonard insisted quietly, pulling Slava, whose right arm now rested around Leonard’s haunch, to an unoccupied part of the living room.
“The lilac fog,” the crooner sang, “sails above our heads.” Slava watched one of Leonard’s trousered, loafered feet kick the air, the keys in his pocket producing a businesslike jingle and his center of gravity immigrating position until Slava was nearly embracing him from behind. “I love this song!” Oslik’s bulb-girlfriend shrieked. Leonard’s leg returned to the floor and he turned to look at Slava: “Nu?” Obediently, Slava kicked up his left leg. “Attaboy!” Leonard roared, rubbing Slava’s head to indicate admiration for his balance despite his having consumed nearly as much cognac as Leonard.
By now the chorus was up—“Conductor, please don’t rush / Can’t you understand / I’m saying goodbye / To her forever”—the entire room shouting in unison and swaying in place. Leonard’s turn: He kicked up his right leg. Slava kicked up his right leg. Leonard swigged, Slava swigged. They went around the living room, the others singing and yelling. Slava must have revealed an unforeseen aptitude for the primary maneuver, because soon he was alone in the middle of the living room, Leonard seeking respite in Galina’s arms and pushing Vera out onto the dance floor. “Ve-ra! Ve-ra!” the crowd chanted, dividing her name into the syllables that Slava had mouthed so many times as a boy. The room swimming, he summoned her with an open hand. Rolling her eyes, she rose to join him, swirling and twirling, demurely coquettish, as he kicked and sprang. They hadn’t planned, but somehow they fit together. Grandfather’s tutelage, so useless at Bar Kabul, directed his arms and legs, and she—she danced on heels as if on bare feet, though after a while she kicked them off to applause. Finally, the song ended and they collapsed on the carpet. The room thundered, feet stamping the floor.
After they were done, everyone wanted to try it, the dining table pulled back and the carpet rolled up until the living room resembled a dance floor. “Tomorrow the people downstairs are going to have my head.” Lara shook her head. “Take this down, apologize, and everything will be okay,” Vera said, holding up an unopened bottle of cognac. “See what we started?” Leonard slurred to Slava even though he was buried in Galina’s considerable bosom. Slava walked up to Leonard’s slumped form and laid a wet kiss on his cheek. “Oh, Galinochka, you frisky, frisky . . .” Leonard mumbled, and everyone burst out laughing. They danced until the clock showed midnight.
Downstairs, waiting with Vera for the cruiserweight’s taxi in the stifling air of the street, Slava bristled with a child’s excitement. He repeated a maneuver from their pas de deux.
She smiled. “I’m happy you’re happy,” she said. He toed the curb, recalling the evening, and laughed to himself. “So, listen,” she said. “I have an idea for how to get them together.” She had switched back to English.
“Who?” he blinked.
“Our parents.”
“Ve-ra!” he said, trying to be playful. “Let it be. It’s not our business. They’re grown-ups.”
She shrugged and looked away, disappointed. “I told my mother we talked.”
“Was she angry?” Slava said.
“No, she was happy,” she said. “She can’t do it herself, but if I do it, it’s okay. We are too small here to divide from argument. Did I say that right?”
“Sure.”
“You speak like an American, like you were born here.”
“We came here at the same age,” he said.
“But I stayed in Brooklyn. I speak Russian most of the day. Sometimes full days with no English. In Italy, my parents always wanted me to play with you. Slava is a good boy, he studies his translation book. You run away and I stay, and my parents still always say: Why you can’t be more like Slava?”
Slava’s excitement was emptying into the overheated air. There was a honk, and a second later, Vova skirted the curb with a flourish. Slava, until now no ally of the cruiserweight, felt a tremor of gratitude.
“How was it?” Vova asked cheerfully when the young pair was once again lodged in his rearview mirror.
“Very nice,” Vera said quietly.
“And where is my care package from the table?” Vova said flirtatiously. Slava wanted to brain him.
“Oh my God, I am so embarrassed,” Vera said, covering her mouth. “And it was a good table. Lara’s mom was by earlier and cooked everything. Let me go upstairs.”
Vova peeled off before his martyrdom could be compromised. They rode the rest of the way in a merciful silence. Slava thought of Arianna. Despite having been overcome with guilt after she called, he hadn’t thought of her again all evening. Only a week had passed since Bar Kabul—he couldn’t see friends one night? Then why did he lie about where he was? He moaned in annoyance, raising a look from Vera. “Nothing, nothing,” he said.
“That’s it, my doll,” Vova said when they’d pulled up at the curb of Vera’s building. Vova and Slava caught each other’s eyes in the rearview mirror and surged into action at the same time. Vera was seated next to Slava in the back, on the other side of the sedan from Vova, so the gentlemen started out even. The driver door (Vova) and the rear left (Slava) opened at the same time, the two of them emerging to circle the vehicle—Vova around the hood, Slava around the trunk—in order to open Vera’s door. They arrived at the same time. Vova lowered his head with a taunting smirk, acknowledging defeat.
“Thank you, Slava,” Vera said, her lips on his cheek. “Very nice evening. Did you have a good time?” Her drawn face indicated that she didn’t expect a reply. She set off down the rain-slicked flagstone leading to her entrance. Slava felt as if he should run after her and apologize, but for what? Vova, next to him, glared like a lunatic brother of the groom. As Vera entered the foyer, she waved. Like a pair in a musical, Vova and Slava waved back. The neighborhood floated in an unearthly quiet.
“Get in,” Vova said.
“No, I’ll walk,” Slava said. “I’ll pay, of course.”
“Get in, get in, paramour,” Vova said. “You need the train for Manhattan, right? At this hour, you need the Q. Let’s go.” Pathetically, Slava obeyed.
“Quite a performance, Romeo,” Vova said when they were inside the car. Perhaps he had insisted on driving him, Slava thought, so he could torment him all the way to the subway station. “Don’t feel bad,” Vova went on. “With a girl like that, it won’t happen the first time. The parents have to meet you, that whole dance. Mama has to give the green light.”
“You are speaking from firsthand experience?” Slava said.
Vova studied Slava in the rearview. “I am trying to help you, Casanova,” he said. “It helps if there’s competition. Wakes them up a little.”
“I really appreciate it,” Slava said.
“Don’t sweat it,” he said. “We’re just speaking here, like men.”
A light rain returned to streak the windows of the taxi. Slava stared at the empty streets of neighborhoods he had not seen in years. He had been wrong about it all looking the same. Here things changed, too, just more imperceptibly. He wondered if Arianna had gone to her club by herself. He saw her hair whipping ar
ound her shoulders as she danced to the Little Darlings. He thought briefly about taking Vova’s taxi all the way to the Upper West Side, but he couldn’t do that now, with Vera’s perfume all over him.
Extracting himself from Vova’s taxi at the Q station, Slava gave him eight dollars above the owed total. They shook hands through the window, Slava’s palm like a peanut in Vova’s tonnish maw. “Fear not, chuvak!” Vova said, and cleared a pellet of snot onto the pavement. “We’re on the same side.” And with that, he drove off.
–10–
AUGUST 2006
Even in frailty and mourning, Grandfather performed. After a couple of days, Slava gave up trying to understand, to map and figure the links. Within forty-eight hours, he had calls from a Bukharan Jew named Lev, who had never gone west of Kazakhstan, let alone Nazi-held territory; a young woman who wanted Slava to take down the story of her father, a procurement official in the Soviet Ministry of Forests; a pensioner from Perm who began with a complaint about a willful granddaughter (who, by the way, was single); and a couple from Bashkiria who wanted Slava to know that the Soviet government had created a special home for Soviet Jews in the Far East, where they had visited twice in their capacities as poet laureate of Ufa (he) and the editor of the literary magazine Kalibr (she). Slava said yes to almost everyone. He drew the line at one grandmother who wanted a letter to President Bush requesting a larger apartment, and an old man who simply needed a ride to the supermarket. Everyone else, he took.
In their stories, his grandmother went to clear the rubble from bomb damage. She patched up German army uniforms, her fingers avoiding those two hideous thunderbolts. She boiled syringes at the hospital. She revealed herself as a strong-headed young woman. Not very good in school. Obedient. Liked clothes. Lucky that her father was a tailor. Slava watched her savor a piece of dark bread with sunflower oil.
With a hill of unfolded newspapers and magazines on his desk concealing his stack of history books, he watched the office clock crawl with impossible slowness. When the clock hands agreed on six P.M. and Arianna left for uptown, thinking he was staying to work, he ran to the Brooklyn-bound subways. He became a connoisseur of dispatcher accents, the various types of train lurches and grunts, bodega banners, night skies, and Brooklyn’s regional humor.
To Lev the Bukharan Jew, he gave Irvin’s broken English. (“Camp wall was like giant, bigger than tree. Climb was if you wanted sueycide, and nobody who say nice Polish girl from village give food hush-hush over wall is saying accurate. Wall was impossible. And there was not being nice Polish girls.”) The forestry official, ever the Soviet bureaucrat, appended to his claim letter a list of newspaper clippings and maps. He took an academician’s pleasure in pointing out that the wild forests of western Belarus and eastern Poland where the partisans hid and that the Germans themselves feared to enter—Perelaz, Zabielowo, Chrapiniewo, Lipiczanska, Jasinowo, Nalibocka, even their names impenetrable—were such inaccessible refuges for those bent on sedition that, after the war, the Soviets turned forestry management into a branch of state security.
On the way to the evening’s home from the subway, Slava would stop at a Russian bakery and buy marzipans, chocolates, a round babka, sometimes a bottle. At the store—Net Cost, Smart Cost, Low Cost—he liked when the cashier line was long. The dishes were cooling on the dinner table of the apartment where he was due, but a sin to come empty-handed, and more important, he sneaked a whiff of the old neighborhood in the name of research. He eavesdropped on the conversations in line, Ukrainian if the g’s were uttered like h’s, Georgian if they emphasized the wrong vowel. These unlike people had been tossed together like salad by the cupidity of the Soviet government, and now, in America, they were forced to keep speaking Russian, their sole bond, if they wanted to understand each other, and they did, because a Ukrainian’s hate of a Russian was still warmer than his love of an American. The brethren who had remained in the old world had moved forward in history—they were now citizens of independent countries, their native languages withdrawn from under the rug, buffed, spit-shined, returned to first place, but here in Brooklyn, they were stuck forever in Soviet times. They had gotten marooned on a new island except for what their children would do. Judging by Vera and her friends, the children would not do very differently.
Sometimes, wandering Bensonhurst, Midwood, Brighton, Slava counted how far she was. She bred confused feelings inside him. At seven, she had been like a sister, but now she was a woman, and though he was ashamed at the feeling—to compare Las Vegas with Italy!—he couldn’t think of her without a special recognition filling his chest. So she hung in the back of his thoughts like a pale moon, neither there nor not there. Every time his grandfather was about to give him a new name and address, like a dealer feeding his junkie, Slava held his breath, wondering if the name would be Vera’s, also wishing it wouldn’t be hers—just as his grandfather could not bring himself to charge a Rudinsky interest, Slava would not dare take a Rudinsky only to bed. The reason why eluded him, and he scratched at it as if at a bump of paint on a wall. Was it something psychological?—she was his lost childhood . . . He would stop himself there: Removed from his elders or not, like them, he had no patience for psychology talk.
Having arrived at that evening’s home, Slava would be feted and fed, interrogated about his romantic situation (its inconclusiveness was then mourned over), and bitched to about his grandfather. He would steer the conversation back to the war, the endless war. The assembled—the families before him appeared in full—sat before him as before a judge, the children grasping the mottled hands of the old ones while listening to stories they never had the temerity to prod for themselves. The American dollar would force out the stories that love and consideration had elected not to elicit. Slava, working in concert with the philosophy of the nation that had taken them in—good works as the by-product of self-interest—was able to give the descendants at the table, the children and grandchildren, the gift of knowing, at last, the unknown corners of their forebears, all because the forebears stood to make money. How cheaply they fell—the heart’s greatest terrors for a bushel of euros. Slava wasn’t a judge: He was a middleman, a loan shark, an alchemist—he turned lies into facts, words into money, silence into knowledge at last.
Arianna had spoken of New York as a secret in her first months here. Now Slava had one of his own. It was a demotic secret. It didn’t concern a glorious city. The sharers of his secret were ugly and without taste, uninitiated and crude. Lumpy and bowed, foul-breathed, colored like eggplants, hairy and hairless. But he was writing every night—for a publication no one would see, a readership of no more than a handful, whomever the Claims Conference used to evaluate applications. But the knowledge that someone, somewhere, at a time unknown to him (Slava was brushing his teeth, or sitting on the toilet, or absentmindedly heating his lunch), was reading something he had written was erotic to him. Yes, it gave him arousal. He thought of Beau and Arch Dyson with indifference. So what if they didn’t know; he knew. Every word he put down, every letter he finished, he imagined walking into their offices and dropping them in a pile at their feet. He notched every letter—#7, #11, #20—like a don juan women on his bedpost.
The families didn’t want to let him go. They begged him to stay long after the work was finished. Ordinarily martyrs—a rain had soaked only their clothesline, the wafers increased in cost only at the store where they bought—finally they had been authorized (no, required) to speak, which lowered their guard and left them hollering recklessly, as if there were not inquiring neighbors one wall over. It fell to Slava—half listening to what those gathered around him had actually gone through during the war so that he could pillage it later for the oddly specific details he had come to learn made a narrative feel authentic—to make sure the windows were closed, and once he even tapped on a wall to test its thickness.
One night, returning to the Manhattan-bound subway from the Dolins in Gravesend (stuffed carp, herring under a fur coat, meat under aspic), Sl
ava sensed that he was being followed. At first he brushed off the suspicion, but no, it was happening. Every turn he took, the leather jacket took with him. Slava took an unnecessary turn; so did the leather jacket. There was no one else on the late street, only televisions flickering behind curtains and the baths at Neck Road sending out steam from the vents. Slava couldn’t turn around and get a fair look without making himself obvious. His heart beat unhappily. He’d known this would happen, except it hadn’t happened, so maybe it wouldn’t. The map of those apartments for which he had written letters—they were dots in a sea of letterless souls, souls who wanted to know what 4C was getting and why. But why would he be followed to the subway instead of from? Wouldn’t they want to know whose house he was going to?
Finally, turning a needless corner, Slava ventured a peek. It was a boy, all of eighteen. Startled, Slava stopped without planning to, giving himself away. The boy stopped, too. They watched each other from half a block away, Slava’s fingers losing circulation from the bags of food with which he was always sent home, which he had to dump in some sufficiently distant garbage can because he couldn’t very well bring them to Arianna’s, though it broke his heart to throw out food. Not knowing his own plan, Slava spun on his heel and began to march toward the boy.
The boy didn’t run. Slava stopped three feet away. In the dim light, he saw a fuzz bristling above the young lips. The boy’s hands were stuffed into the jacket—what did he hold there?
“What do you want?” Slava barked in Russian.
The boy leaped back. He didn’t expect Russian. He hesitated.
Slava cocked his head, demanding an answer. He felt a heady lack of uncertainty. Let them come at me, he thought. But then his sense returned. His pursuer would be an eighteen-year-old boy?
“What is it?” Slava said warily.
“Do you write the letters?” the boy said.
“Says who,” Slava said.
A Replacement Life Page 16