A Replacement Life
Page 32
The plastic carnations that fill Grandmother’s vase are too firm to sway in the light wind, but behind them, a thin greenish stem with a space helmet of white puff bobs in the earth. It was the costume of every meadow outside Minsk; you pinched the stem and blew the puff out like a candle. Slava can summon the name of the flower only in Russian, and in the moment before he scatters the down across what remains of his grandmother, he knows—a fact, he made it—that he will never look up the English translation. The white wisps settle like summertime snow. Oduvanchik.
Acknowledgments
My first thanks are to my grandmother. She really was better than all of us.
Then to my grandfather. A friend of mine once said, “You’re smarter than him, you’re more enlightened than him. But both of us can fit inside his left nut.” Hard to argue.
To my parents, for loving so well and for not giving up.
To Polina Shostak, a woman of singular fortitude, and the Shostak/Golod family—the only ones who remain.
To Alana Newhouse, for inspiring so much. To Annabelle, for the oxytocin. To the Liguoris of Rhode Island, my second family, and especially to the memory of Antoinette Parise, who loved Robert Frost.
To the friends who read drafts, talked shop, and held me up, especially Rob Liguori, Nicole DiBella, Vance Serchuk, Amy Bonnaffons, Chad Benson, Luke Mogelson, Kseniya Melnik, Julian Rubinstein, Ellen Sussman, Meredith Maran, Jacob Soll, Joshua Cohen, Tom Bissell, Ben Holmes, Dan Kaufman, Jilan Kamal and Justin Vogt, Joshua Yaffa and Kate Greenberg, Will Clift, Andrew Meredith, Rebecca Howell, Louis Venosta, Vica Miller, Joseph DiGiacomo, Michelle Ishay and Michael Cohen, LuLing Osofsky, Jules Lewis, Anne Gordon and Andrew Garland, Teddy Wayne, Arthur Phillips. Special thanks to Susan Wise Bauer, who spans categories and is one of the most brilliant, generous, interesting people I know.
To the teachers: Lawrence Weschler, Brian Morton, David Lipsky, and, especially, Darin Strauss and Jonathan Lethem, two of the greatest teachers (and mensches) I’ve encountered. They are not only teachers but mentors, too rare a mantle these days. I met these people because of the NYU MFA program, run by the incomparable Deborah Landau, who redefines patron. To this list, add Joyce Carol Oates, who taught me first and has remembered me always; Star Lawrence, who was the first to give me a chance; William Zinsser, who gives more without eyesight than most with it; Vera Fried, the Pink Dynamo; and the great Jim Harrison, who made me want to write.
To the residencies and organizations that so very generously gave time, and space, and sustenance by many definitions: Norton Island Residency Program in Maine; the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown (with special thanks to Salvatore Scibona for his insight and encouragement); La Napoule Art Foundation in France; Mesa Refuge in Point Reyes Station; the New York Foundation for the Arts; the Albee Foundation in Montauk; Wildacres Retreat in North Carolina; Blue Mountain Center in the Adirondacks; Brush Creek Art Foundation in Wyoming; Djerassi Resident Artists Program in Northern California. It’s hard to put value to what these people and institutions give to artists.
To Henry Dunow. They say the right agent is like the right relationship—elusive until it finally happens, and then it feels destined. Thank you, Henry. You are so good at what you do, and you are such a class act while doing it. You have my gratitude and admiration. Thanks as well to Betsy Lerner and Yishai Seidman.
To Terry Karten for a rare kind of patronage; for having faith, wisdom, vision, and a flawless touch. You gave an incredible blessing, and the way you steer is a model and inspiration.
Thanks as well to Elena Lappin, who has been an exceedingly generous and incisive champion of this book.
Finally, to the walking wounded who survived the degradations of a life in the Soviet Union. For all their warts, they, too, are survivors.
Author’s Note
The pagination of this electronic edition does not match the edition from which it was created. To locate a specific passage, please use your ebook reader’s search tools.
The line between fact and fiction, invention and theft, is as loose as the line between truth and justice. My adopted culture knows this in practice but forgets it in theory—we are transgressives in private and puritans when caught, itself a savory self-deception. This affects literature as much as politics or mortgage lending. Sometimes we struggle to remember that fiction is often nonfiction warped by artifice, and nonfiction unavoidably a reinvention of what actually happened. (I am stealing these words from myself, from a book review I once wrote.) There are lines, of course, but they’re further out than we think. Life is sin and art is theft. Let mine in this novel register as a reminder of this, as well as a tribute to authors who have said something of meaning to me.
22 The line “Every morning, the Soviet men shrouded themselves in Soviet linens and mongreled into the soft air of Tyrrhenian fall: ‘Russo producto! Russo producto!’” appeared previously in a piece I wrote, “Paid in Persimmons,” in Departures magazine (October 2007).
52 “He studied the treacherous slingshot of Arianna’s clavicle” is gratefully stolen from Kseniya Melnik. A different version of the expression appears in the story “Kruchina,” in Snow in May: Stories (Henry Holt, 2014): “Masha looked at Katya’s thin neck sticking out of the collar of her nightgown, the slingshot fork of her clavicle and ropy shoulder, the pollen sprinkling of freckles, just like her mother’s.”
106 “August, / you’re [just] an erotic hallucination” is from Denis Johnson’s poem “Heat,” in The Incognito Lounge and Other Poems (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1994).
152 “The lilac fog / sails above our heads” is from “Don’t Rush, Conductor,” a Russian pop song by Vladimir Markin.
163 “Expensive Trips Nowhere” is the title of a story by Tom Bissell, in God Lives in St. Petersburg and Other Stories (Pantheon, 2005).
165 The phrase “stocking of smoke” comes from the story “Islands” in Aleksandar Hemon’s collection The Question of Bruno (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 2000).
208 The third false Holocaust narrative is a version of a story that became widely known after the war. I learned of it, in addition to other valuable details, from David Guy’s book (Innocence in Hell: The Life, Struggle, and Death of the Minsk Ghetto, trans. Nina Genn, self-published, New York, 2004).
224 “[Her eyes] were gray, a shining gray, though they seemed darker because of their thick lashes” is a variation on Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, Penguin Classics, 2004). The original sentence reads, “Her shining grey eyes, which seemed dark because of their thick lashes, rested amiably and attentively on his face . . .”
254 “I am a finished man . . . The sun must be the sun first of all” is from Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, translated by Larissa Volokhonsky and Richard Pevear (Vintage, 2012).
254 “Be true to your own strange kind” is a variation on Louis Simpson’s poem “The Cradle Trap” in At the End of the Open Road: Poems (Wesleyan University Press, 1963). The original reads, “Be true, be true / To your own strange kind.”
262 “Better to permit a guilty conscience to keep walking around, to increase the weight of its guilt!”: Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment.
263 “They say that at Sevastopol, the people were in a terrible fright that the enemy would attack openly and take Sevastopol immediately. But when they saw that the enemy preferred a regular siege, they were delighted! The thing would drag on for two months at least, and they could relax!”: Ibid.
280 The italicized words in “This was what awaited, the dark collapse between Vera’s legs said” is from Chang-Rae Lee’s Native Speaker (Riverhead, 1996).
281 “If you say there are elephants flying outside your window, no one will believe you. But if you say there are six elephants flying outside your window, it’s a different story” is a variation on Gabriel García Márquez, “The Art of Fiction, No. 69, Gabriel García Márquez,” interview by Peter H. Stone, in The Paris Review, no. 82 (Winte
r 1981). There is no indication who translated the interview. The original reads, “For example, if you say that there are elephants flying in the sky, people are not going to believe you. But if you say that there are four hundred and twenty-five elephants flying in the sky, people will probably believe you.”
292 “The tea was bitter and he blamed existence” is a variation on Bernard Malamud, The Fixer (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004). In the original phrasing—“It tasted bitter and he blamed existence”—the “it” does refer to tea.
297 “Slava could have risen and gone four ways at once”: Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment.
299 “I have read that a good investigator begins from far away . . . And then he jumps like a jaguar!”: Ibid.
311 “Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away” is from Mary Oliver’s poem “The Summer Day” in New and Selected Poems (Beacon Press, 1992).
About the Author
BORIS FISHMAN was born in Belarus and immigrated to the United States at the age of nine. His journalism, essays, and criticism have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, the New Republic, the Wall Street Journal, the London Review of Books, and other publications. He is the editor of Wild East: Stories from the Last Frontier, an anthology about Eastern Europe after the fall of Communism, and the recipient of fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Fine Arts Work Center, among others. He lives in New York City. A Replacement Life is his first novel.
www.borisfishman.com
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Copyright
This novel is a work of fiction. Any references to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are intended only to give the fiction a sense of reality and authenticity, and are used fictitiously. All other names, characters, and places, and all dialogue and incidents portrayed in this book, are the product of the author’s imagination.
A REPLACEMENT LIFE. Copyright © 2014 by Boris Fishman. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Fishman, Boris, 1979–
A replacement life : a novel / Boris Fishman.—First Edition.
p. cm
ISBN 978-0-06-228787-8 (hardcover)—ISBN 978-0-06-228788-5 (paperback)—ISBN 978-0-06-228789-2 (ebook) 1. Jews, Russian—United States—Fiction. 2. Authorship—Fiction. 3. Identity (Psychology)—Fiction 4. United States—Emigration and immigration. 5. Psychological fiction. 6. Domestic fiction. I. Title.
PS3606.I824R47 2014
813’.6—dc23
2013048444
EPub Edition JUNE 2014 ISBN 9780062287892
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