“You’re always asking,” Slava said. “Here it is. Here they are.”
“Show it to me,” she said.
They walked without plan, happenings from long ago reminding themselves to Slava. In this store, his grandfather had purchased a mink for Slava’s mother without paying a dollar. The owner of the store, a man whose existence depended on wringing every penny out of the mink in Grandfather’s hands, had ended up pleading with him to take it for free, though Slava didn’t recall the exact reason or, more likely, was too young to comprehend the machinations, though he was old enough to understand that minks weren’t free and watched his grandfather from below with wonder. That was Grandfather. Arianna reiterated her desire to meet him. People always wanted to meet Grandfather when you told them about him, Slava said. They lit up.
Here were Uzbeks, here Tajiks, here Georgians, here Moldovans. Here you could get a manicure and pedicure for ten dollars. (This truly elevated Arianna’s eyebrows.) They were staring at the row of identically frost-haired women working the chairs of the beauty salon when Slava froze. Without thinking, he had brought Arianna to a neighborhood where half a dozen homes had enjoyed from him forged letters. What an amateur. His little heart had been wounded—he wanted to show her something that he, not she, knew, and he’d just yielded to the impulse. Grandfather had passed down his fraudulent soul? Slava was a pinkie on Grandfather’s hand, no more.
“What is it?” Arianna said.
“So I just wanted to show you,” he said quickly. “We can go.” He cursed himself a second time; he was retreating as artlessly as he had approached.
“What?” she said. “We just got here. I want to go drink hot tea, Uzbek-style. Take me, please.”
As they walked to the boardwalk, he tried to map the homes that required a wide berth and half listened as Arianna babbled on about their surroundings. Where he saw desperation and scraping, she saw another act in New York’s great ethnic circus. As they walked past the Key Food, he thought he spotted old Anna Kots waddling out with a grocery cart, but it was a double. At the chaikhana, he strongly recommended a table in the back, away from the windows. It was cooler by the windows, Arianna said—they had been flung open, the sea spangling with a heat-crazed blue light past the wide beach. “I thought you wanted to be hot, like the Uzbeks,” he said, and she obeyed.
“What is it?” she said when they were seated.
“Nothing, nothing,” he said.
“Is it strange for you to be here?”
He was saved by the arrival of a waitress in an Uzbek rug cap. An earpiece wire coiled out of her ear. “Are you in the FBI?” he joked to her in Russian. She laughed—this was how the servers communicated with the kitchen. Arianna waited for a translation, but none came. She was asked, however, to choose the tea. Realizing that Slava was accompanied by an American, the waitress became formal. When she returned, she set down the tray and held up each item: “This is green tea, please—kuk-choi. This is spoons, please.” She held up two rug caps: yes or no? Slava said no, Arianna said yes. The waitress permitted herself a smile and said in English: “I leave, you decide.”
“Why does your grandfather know how Uzbeks drink tea?” Arianna said when the waitress departed.
“That was where he was evacuated during the war,” Slava said cautiously.
“They’re talking about expanding eligibility,” she said. “It’s in the paper. He might qualify in the end.”
“We’re hoping,” Slava said twice as cautiously.
“I can’t imagine what it’s like there.”
“He was conscription age; he would piss himself in the street so recruiters would think he was retarded.”
“You always talk about him.”
“You asked about him.”
“I meant you never talk about your parents. And I only talk about my parents.”
“I even have my grandfather’s last name instead of my father’s,” Slava said. “They made the decisions, I guess. I would like to meet the Eagle.”
“Sandra has her charms, too.”
“I mean that I like the way you feel about him more.”
She looked toward the water. “Do you know that in seven years in New York, I haven’t seen the ocean.”
“How does it compare to the other one?”
“Whenever I read The Stranger, when he kills the Arab on the beach, this is how I imagine it. The water so blue that it’s black. And the sun so bright that everything feels bleached.”
“You’ve read it more than once?”
“I reread books all the time. Especially if they made you read it in high school. Then it’s like a measuring stick. This is what I thought about it at seventeen, this is what I think about it now. I used to love One Hundred Years of Solitude—if you leave out all the chauvinist crap. But I couldn’t get through it last year. The woman eats dirt, the colonel’s blood flows from the war back to the house where he was born . . . so melodramatic. It’s me right now, not the book; I’ll try again in a couple of years. I think good books should be translated once per generation. I have a Stranger from 1948 and 1982, but from England, and a 1988 American. They’re all different.” She sipped her tea, holding the piala from below with both palms. “García Márquez was brought up by his grandparents. That’s the way I think of you.”
He laughed. “You’re rambling. Are you nervous?”
She smiled. “Maybe.”
He extended a hand toward her. She placed a palm inside it. It was warm from the bottom of the tea bowl.
“Was Grandfather telling the truth?” Slava said. “Are you less warm because you are as hot as the weather?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Let’s go outside and check.”
Miraculously, the ocean was stingingly crisp despite having been under assault from the sun for two months. It would stay swimmable until October, this guest welcome to linger. Arianna squealed as the water hit her toes. The rocketing spray climbed up her legs. He had forgotten all about the neighborhood’s minefield of betrayal. Momentarily, he felt exempted from responsibility.
“It smells like fish,” she said.
“No, fish smells like it,” he said. They laughed. She kicked the surf in his direction. He filled his mouth with seawater and wouldn’t stop chasing her until he had squirted it down her back.
They fell asleep on the sand, his rolled-up T-shirt for his pillow and his chest for hers. He smelled the brine on her face as he dozed off. His last thought before dozing off was: He was his best with her and his worst.
The sun had slunk off by the time he awoke. Arianna still slept, so he didn’t dare move. The departing yolk of the sun streaked a final tantrum of pinks, violets, and golds, a better sunset than the hot, sweaty day deserved. He remembered reading in one of his newspapers that postcard sunsets were actually caused by excess smog. Just as human ash could give you gorgeous five-pound tomatoes. Just as Yevgeny Gelman, Israel Abramson, and Lazar Rudinsky, a hundred years later, would give you Arianna Bock. Everything in between was a loss, a write-off.
When she awoke, they wandered back down to the ocean’s edge, the lapping sheets of the Atlantic theirs alone except for a couple petting by the lifeguard stand. The evening was taking on a bruised purple glow. A lone streetlight called them back from the boardwalk. The sand beneath them had cooled quickly, but if you buried your feet, it was still warm below.
“You were born over there,” she said, and pointed into the darkness.
“The ocean in the dark freaks me out,” he said.
“Me, too,” she said.
She took his hand and they tiptoed into the cold black water. Slava had been staring at the river from the edge of his neighborhood for years, but this was his first step inside the water that bordered New York on all sides. When you thought about it, it was as waterbound as a Venice, or an Amsterdam, but here, this natural boundary had been reduced to a sideshow. You did not think of New York as a water city. What if the water rose, as the scientists kept say
ing now and then. What would go first? What would be carried away, and what would rise in its place? The thought of a different city, a city he could have a hand in, made him excited and gave him the boldness to wade deeper into the impenetrable ocean.
–15–
MONDAY, AUGUST 28, 2006
On Monday, the Times carried a story about a lawsuit against the German government by a group calling itself Advocates for Historical Justice. The plaintiffs, represented by an Australian attorney with the surely invented name of Howard Settledecker, had “made an appeal to the German Holocaust restitution funds to revise eligibility requirements to include those on the Eastern Front who had never been incarcerated in a ghetto or a concentration camp but had suffered nevertheless as a result of the German invasion.”
Beau wore suspenders over a pink shirt. The sleeve creases could cut. His eyes gleamed with a weekend of rest, sport, and other diversions. He greeted everyone and slid his thumbs under his suspenders. “The fall issue this Friday,” he said. “We might have late-breaking up front. Gruber is still filing. But it has to be shuttered on Friday. Acceptable to everyone?” Everyone nodded.
“There’s a story in the Times today about Holocaust reparations,” Beau went on. “Anyone read it? You know how I feel about the Times beating us, so we might ignore it. But just in case, there’s a press conference this afternoon at the Museum of Jewish Heritage. Howard Settledecker! You’re in for a treat. Mr. Grayson, when did my profile run?”
“I’ll look it up, Mr. Reasons,” Mr. Grayson said. “Nineteen ninety-seven, I believe.”
“Who wants it?” Beau said. “I want two.”
A familiar hand rose, the cuff of the blazer riding down to the elbow.
“Peter,” Beau said. “Excellent. Who else?”
The cubicles produced no response. Slava’s mind was floating with Otto, trying to imagine the angles.
“How about a rematch?” Beau said. “Mr. Gelman, can we have the honor? Let’s see what our little clinic accomplished.”
Slava looked up, startled. He felt Arianna at his temple again. He couldn’t understand what she was trying to telegraph. Do it? Don’t do it?
“Mr. Gelman?” Beau said. “Should I plead for you to take an assignment from Century?” The group tittered nervously.
Slava didn’t speak.
“I’ll take that as a yes,” Beau said.
“Want to just go downtown together?” Peter said. “Split a cab?”
They whooshed downstairs in the glass elevator. Outside, Peter surged toward the curb and stuck out his hand. “There’s a system,” he explained once they’d climbed into the taxi. “You have to find the biggest building on the street and get ahead of it. Most people don’t think of that. They just stand in front of their buildings and wait.”
“Doesn’t the building with the most people also have the most cabs emptying out?” Slava said.
Peter scratched the wisps sprouting from his chin and admitted that Slava had a point.
They continued in silence. They hadn’t spoken since the competition. They hadn’t spoken much before, either, but now their distance had an ill-feeling cast. At Thirty-Fourth, Peter turned to Slava. “Can we clear the air?” He extended a hand.
Slava nodded and took it. Despite his near translucence, Peter had a firm, dry clasp. “Thanks,” Peter said. “I’m glad.”
“Tell me what it takes,” Slava said.
Peter looked at him quizzically.
“They publish everything you give them.”
Peter threw his head back, flattered and exasperated. “About one out of ten things I give them.”
“What does it take?”
“What difference does it make?” Peter said. “You don’t like what I write, anyway.”
Slava, confronted with the truth, said nothing.
“There’s a style,” Peter said. “It’s not your style.”
“I want it to be my style,” Slava said.
“You don’t,” Peter said. “Otherwise, it would be.”
Despite the choking weather, the press conference was taking place outside. Slava didn’t understand why Settledecker was passing up the opportunity to be photographed inside, next to the cattle cars and shoe piles advertised by the banners lining the drive to the museum. Slava had skimmed the Times story before walking out with Peter: Australian Settledecker (he owned a quarter of some sparsely settled territory in the country’s hinterland), “the unapologetic mastermind of controversial publicity campaigns that have succeeded in compelling United Nations resolutions, the return of looted art, and university firings.” In resentment, Slava had declined to peruse Beau’s article.
On a broad gray dais, Settledecker swung his long arms and scratched his beard. He wore an ill-fitting three-piece suit. You could see his ankles when he gestured with special intensity.
“What’s with the suit?” Peter said. “He looks like a tailor from the shtetl.” He pronounced “shtetl” carefully, as if he had learned the word that morning in the Encyclopedia of Jewish History in the fact-checkers’ library.
Peter had instincts; he was right without knowing it. The vest, the striped shirt underneath it, the usually fastidious beard allowed to go unkempt: Settledecker was subtly channeling a poor Jew.
There were three rows of black folding chairs to the side of the dais, filled with pensioners holding on to reedy bouffants in the suffocating wind off the Hudson. By the cheap jackets shielding them from the clandestine ravages of the breeze, by the gold teeth sparkling in the strong sun, by the dazed faces—you knew. Nashi. Russians all.
Slava made the next observation in his notepad with astonishment: Underneath the jackets, they wore prison uniforms. Striped prison uniforms. They could have been from a Halloween store. Numbers had been embroidered on the chests, yellow stars taped beneath them. Some of the seniors, worried about the lost impact of stars concealed by outerwear, had un-Velcroed the six-pointed stars and were trying to affix them to their overcoats.
They snacked: cylinders of cookies, bread-and-cheese sandwiches, yogurt. Behind the seating, a long table covered in white tablecloths held bowls of sandwiches and bottles of water for the postcoital repast. The seated periodically turned to make sure no one was making unauthorized advances on the food. On the rim of the meadow, penny-colored seniors visiting from Florida paused to take in their less well-preserved contemporaries on camcorder.
“Why would they put all these old people in the heat?” Slava said to Peter.
“You think they could fit this arrangement inside?” Peter said, his pen moving fluidly down his notepad. “I’m going to walk around.” He nodded toward the chairs.
Two young women were trying to attach a large banner that said “Remembrance” to a fence behind the dais. It kept kicking up in the wind. Settledecker yelled at them from the platform, the coils of his hair leaping and crouching. Eventually, he gave up and began to choreograph a camera crew unfolding its mantises. He shouted for an assistant to weigh down the napkin towers on the serving tables.
Peter was bent above a turtle-faced pensioner. “Look at that kikele,” the older man was shouting, pointing his sailing cap at Settledecker. “Ai-ai-ai. You have to admire how far a Jew can go in this country.”
Peter looked at Slava and smiled dumbly, pointing his pen at Turtle-Face. The Devickis, nobles of Poland, had partaken of Russian boar and timber but hadn’t bothered with the language. Peter was straining for the dim corners of long-unvisited brain rooms where a grandmother or grandfather once used words that shared more than they didn’t with Russian. From where in Poland had Peter’s ancestors come? Slava would have to ask him. Minsk had been the western edge of the Soviet Union until 1939, the villages west of it Polish territory. If it wasn’t for transliteration and history, he and Peter could have been countrymen. Peter could have been Slava’s Slav twin.
Slava was about to start across to help when one of Settledecker’s assistants appeared before them. She knelt in front of th
e old man, her black top hot just to look at. Settledecker seemed to surround himself only with women. Peter said something to the girl, then looked back at Slava, thumbs up.
At last everything was ready—the seniors seated, the assistants lined up behind Settledecker, the cameramen staring into their viewfinders. Settledecker scratched at his beard and approached the microphone, his modest potbelly jiggling. Cautiously, he tapped the head, as if it were the first microphone of his life.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said. He swiveled to face the rows of folding chairs. “Survivors,” he nodded. He returned his gaze to the cameras and looked ahead without speaking. All at once there was too much silence. Settledecker coughed. Then he turned back to the folding chairs. The pensioners were motionless. Settledecker rolled his eyes and, half turning, hissed to someone behind him. One of the assistants ran down the steps of the dais and whispered into the ear of the woman in the corner chair of the first row. Oi-oi-oi. The woman slapped her forehead and pulled at the nylon jacket of the woman next to her. “Poshli, Roza, my idyom!” Let’s go, Roza, we’re moving.
The first row followed with discipline. Then the second, waiting patiently until the first had filed out. Settledecker nodded from the stage. The lead woman, the assistant’s hand gently steering her back, began to mount the platform. Roza and the rest followed. Ghosts, they were going to file past Settledecker as he spoke.
“Ladies and gen—” Settledecker started again, but a tugboat blared from the Hudson. He opened his hands to the sky. “We will begin, of course, only when God wills it.” Light laughter from the grass. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said. He half turned again: “Survivors.” He pointed at the cameras. “And I do call them survivors. Because they are. I am going to pose a question to you. Any of you. You, sir.” He selected a cameraman. “Imagine your country—our country—is invaded. Imagine our conquerors—and make no mistake, we’ve been conquered—our conquerors have no special feeling for Americans, but it’s New Yorkers they really dislike. Oh, they really hate them. Difficult to imagine, isn’t it?” Another round of laughter. “The rest of America is more or less autonomous, but New Yorkers they herd into concentration camps.” Settledecker lifted his hand and began to count on his fingers. “Starvation. Disease. Extermination. Gas chambers. You see what I’m getting at. Sir, where are you from?”
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