A Replacement Life (11 page)

“The satin skies, that sort of thing.”

“Slava!” she said. “In the dictionary, next to asshole—you.” She slammed a fist into his chest.

“Sorry,” he agreed.

“You’ve got me wound up, now I’m hot to say the poem.”

“Say it,” he said.

Her eyes settled at his neck. He tried to lift her chin, but she swatted his arm away. She spoke in such a rushed, low monotone that he had to make her stop and start over. “Just let me finish,” she said.

“No,” he said, making her look up at him. “Please. Slowly.” So she started over. She spoke clearly this time, and he listened intently, but he could hardly focus on the words.

The bar they were heading to, Straight Shooters, arrived too soon. Here, too,
Arianna knew the bartender. They really were straight shooters on the alcohol issue, or perhaps it was Arianna’s acquaintance that secured them such brimming glasses. The music was mellower, Southern if he had to guess, and there was a more committed row of solitary drinkers at the bar. She made him twirl her before they sat down. His head heavy with drink, he tried, in the noise, to distinguish why he was here—to be with her or merely without himself? Slava was not much of a drinker, but gazing at the solo patrons seated down the length of the bar, locked away from each other and the world by the crisp pints in their hands, he sensed clearly the appeal of their American pastime. His legs helixed with Arianna’s at two bar stools.

“You haven’t told me a thing,” she said. “I told you about my hips, for God’s sake.”

“My grandmother died yesterday,” he blurted out.

“Shit,” she said as if she had done something wrong. “Are you serious? Are you all right? Don’t answer that. I don’t know why people ask that.”

“It was a long time coming,” he reassured her.

“I’m sorry.” She took his hands.

He shook his head to say it was fine.

“Were you close?”

“Yes. No. It’s hard to answer.” His head weighed two tons. He freed a hand and tried to get the bartender’s attention.

She slid off her stool and returned a minute later with two shot glasses.

“You don’t clink,” he said.

She nodded and drank in one gulp. He sipped his. “Tell me something about her,” she said.

Slava gazed past Arianna’s shoulder. The bar drinkers were undermining their noble solitude by staring into the blue screens of cell phones.

“You don’t have to,” she added.

His mouth felt dry. “My grandfather,” he said, “you have to give him credit. At eighty, the wheels are still turning.” He finished the drink, a brown burn.

She awaited more. “She’s a survivor,” he said. He tipped his forehead to make his meaning clear—Holocaust survivor—but Arianna did not require the clarification. “Only she and her sister,” he went on. “The rest of the family—gone. It takes sixty years for her to get restitution. How do they calculate it? Five thousand for a mother, four for a father, three for a grandparent? What if you were raised by the grandparents? What if the grandparents are the parents? You have to agree: It’s tricky.”

“Don’t say things like that.”

He studied her. Did questions like this cease to exist because you didn’t bring them up? He took her hand in his. To restrain his irritation? Because it would dispose her toward him? Her fingers felt smooth and dry. She allowed them to be clasped. “The point is,” he said, “the restitution letter came just days before she died.” He opened his hands. “Isn’t.”

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“My grandfather says, ‘Send it in anyway. Write it about me.’ But he was evacuated.”

“You can’t do that,” she said.

“Can’t I?” he said. “Did you know that they fertilized crops with human ash? After the war, the tomatoes were the size of an infant’s head.” He gave the words the same inflection that his grandfather did, only in English. They had a new but not unfamiliar sound on his tongue. He knew how to say them. She looked away.

“Can you blame him?” he went on. “You think he had plans to leave Minsk in 1941? No, he ran from the Germans. Then he came back and was a Jew under the Soviets for forty-five years, which is to say a lower life-form. Then America. Here you’re not a Jew anymore. Here
you’re an immigrant.
Go back where you came from, Commie
. You don’t think he’s due?” The rehearsal of Grandfather’s arguments came with wondrous facility to Slava. He rested his hand on his forehead contemplatively, to see how it felt.

“I want to tell you a story,” Arianna said carefully. “There was a Soviet family that was settled near us. We’d sponsored them, actually. I had been pen pals with the son before they were released—you know the story. And so Mother Bock says, ‘Harry, get them memberships in the synagogue.’ And my father, he’s not as quick as my mother, but then he will surprise you. And so he says: ‘I don’t think that’s for them, Sandy.’ Meaning, they’re not religious. And Sandra says, ‘How will they ever become religious unless people like us—’ and so on and so forth. Harry, as always, in the end, he does what Sandra says, and he gets them synagogue memberships. One hundred fifty a person, times three, and this was fifteen years ago. Also, the synagogue has limited seats, he had to talk to the registrar, get special permission. But we don’t see them—the Rubins, they were called. Instead, we see another family, also three—Americans. They get to chatting with my parents, it’s Friday-night services, everyone has a couple of shots. And they tell them this Russian family sold them the memberships. Sandra—you should have seen her face. After all the lifts, that face doesn’t really telegraph emotion, but at that moment she could have been in the opera. She kept her mouth shut only because she was mortified. Harry just chuckled to himself. She wanted to call the police! And he said, ‘Just let them be. Think about what they’ve been through. Give it thirty years, then they’ll ask for it.’”

“Exquisite magnanimity.”

“Slava, I’m on your side.”

“Why do you call your parents by their first names?”

“I don’t know, that’s how it’s always been. I don’t always.”

“Your father bent the rules himself—he got a special favor from the registrar.”

“Are you really going to compare?” she said. “It was for a good cause.”

“Who gets to decide what’s a good cause? You said it: a thirty-year dispensation. Let the savages lie a bit to the Germans.”

She placed her palm on his forearm. “
You
can’t.”

“You’re full of instructions.”

She turned away.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “This isn’t me. This is—”

“I know.”

She knew. There was nothing he could say that she didn’t already know. His irritation wouldn’t abate, but he forced himself to ignore it. “Are your grandparents still alive?” he said.

“Just my grandmother,” she indulged his effort. “Ninety-four young. Swims every morning, e-mails Zen declarations.”

“For instance.”

She brightened. “‘Hi my doll Ari.’ That’s what she calls me. ‘I am finally too old to give a crap what anyone thinks. I wish I’d gotten here fifty years sooner.’ And then the next day, ‘Ari, doll, do you think a ninety-four-year-old woman can’t shake her hips? Yes, she can.’ My grandfather’s gone, all her friends are gone, and all of a sudden she likes a sip of Maker’s and then to the jukebox. Do you know that poem: ‘On the way we passed a long row of elms. She looked at them awhile out of the ambulance window and said, What are all those fuzzy-looking things out there? Trees? Well, I’m tired of them and rolled her head away.’ My God, I am just rambling.”

“Did you cover the mirror when your grandfather died?”

She shrugged. “I was five. I had a dance recital that weekend, so I was doing pirouettes like a loon. I was so sad all the mirrors were covered. I’m named after his father. Ariel. You?”

“I don’t know,” Slava said. “Slava means ‘glory.’ Or ‘fame.’ Depending on what you mean. I covered a mirror. I didn’t feel anything.”

“It’s like weed—you don’t feel anything the first couple of times,” she laughed, ushering stridency out of the conversation. This time he went along. “A shiva lasts for a week,” she went on. “You keep the mirrors covered. Then you see what you feel.”

“I see,” he said.

“Or not,” she said. “You take on too much, so it’s too much, and then you want none of it. You’d rather do nothing than have to do
all that
. But you can choose your own amount.”

“I would like to teach you something as well,” he said.

“Please,” she said.

“I meant I also would like to find something to teach you.”

“I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t think you could.”

“You’re just doing a favor for a colleague.”

“If you think so, Slava, you’re not as smart as I hoped. But finally, yes, I dragged you out. It was easier to get hired by
Century
.”

A slurry smile appeared on his face. “The upside of professional mortification. Why me?”

“You’re not like the others.”

“That’s a foolproof fact.”

“What do you want, Slava?” she said. “You want to publish in
Century
so badly?”

“I guess not,” he said. “I remember the first time I saw it. I was just killing time in the library. A lot of time killing time in the library at Hunter. I’d gone through half the magazines in the periodical rack. And then
Century
. There was a piece about a rape in South Africa, and Sheila”—Sheila Garbanes (pert, tart, groovy) was a staff writer—“had a piece on these two philosophers at the University of Chicago. Ask me if I knew the first thing about philosophy, but I read the whole thing.”

“God, I read the same issue,” she said.

“Arch—”

“On the farmers. The father farms organic and the son farms industrial,” she said. “Imagine if we were reading it at the same time, fifty blocks apart.”

“I want to write something people will read,” he said. “And say, There goes the fellow who wrote that.”

“So do that,” she said. “Wake up tomorrow and write something new. And send it somewhere else. Not
Century
. Some other place. Are you listening? Look at me.”

“I will,” he said, straightening.

“And another thing,” she said. “You don’t think about this anymore between now and then. It can’t help you.”

“Okay,” he said.

“And then the third thing.”

“Yes.” He tried to focus the glaze out of his eyes.

“Take me home.”

In the taxi, he ripped the sleeve of the Balenciaga from her shoulder. He sprang back, remembering Skinny Jeans’s valuation, but she shrugged it away. Her tongue was cool and thick, her breath smoky and clean despite everything they had been drinking. They bit each other’s lips, breathing each other in. He imagined the air spread to every corner of her, down to the dead fingertip, where it stopped.

At the wheel, Hamid Abdul was trying not to watch them. Hamid, his immigrant brother. How Slava was exceeding his immigrant brief with this fine-skinned American specimen. See Slava take the milk of this American skin into his mouth, Hamid. Look at her fingers disappear from your rearview mirror. We are miscegenating with the natives, Hamid, we are assimilating, are we not?

Irvin the doorman did not share Hamid’s interest in Slava’s quarry. He wanted only Slava’s “John Handcocks” for a pair of slacks from dry cleaning. Slava told him that he was going to buy some skinny jeans and be done with this slacks business. “It is absolute,” Irvin nodded obediently.

“What a funny blanket,” Arianna said when they got into the apartment, eyeing the rhombus-shaped opening of the duvet cover. Slava stopped in the doorway to the bathroom. “It’s old,” he said before heading inside.

When he emerged, she was asleep on his clean sheets in her street clothes, the knobs of her knees frowning behind the fabric. He shed the lights, leaving only the desk lamp that had craned above so many drafts. Arianna slept guilelessly, her unnerving alertness finally stilled. He wondered what his grandmother had looked like at the moment she’d drawn her last breath. Had she been aware of it or lost in delirium? Had she been in pain or the opposite of pain? Was she talking now with her dead mother and father and grandfather?
Hello, after all this time. It’s you. Where to begin? Let me tell you about everyone who showed up after you left: Zhenya,
and the dance hall, and Zhenya, and prison, and Zhenya, and Tanya, and Edik, and tiny Slava, and Crimea, and the car accident, and then America, but first Italy, those fat grapes, the sea—I never learned how to swim!—and then, yes, America . . .
He stopped himself. Her memories were his memories. But what were her memories?

He sat staring at the telephone for a long time. It was late, too late to call, but he lifted the cordless anyway, stepping into the bathroom to avoid waking Arianna. Sure, Arianna, he would write something else.

“What’s wrong?” Grandfather said. “What happened?”

“I’m sorry to call so late. You were asleep?”

“What is it?”

“Tell me about Grandmother in the ghetto,” Slava said.

Grandfather was silent, trying to understand. “I don’t know,” he said. “Why are you asking?”

“You wanted me to do something. So I’m asking about her.”

“Oh,” Grandfather said, startled. “But it would be about me.”

“I can’t very well write about what Uzbekistan was like. Think.”

“Oh,” Grandfather said. “I get it. She didn’t like to talk about it.”

“To either of us,” Slava said.

“Well.”

“Well.”

“I don’t know what you want me to say.”

Slava was too tired to talk. Drunkenness had left him, as if he were an inhospitable host. Only weariness remained. It was a special kind of weariness that descended rarely, according to internal chemical regimens he did not understand. It made striving difficult, but also falsehood.

“She was in the ghetto,” Grandfather said at last. “She escaped. She weighed nothing—the partisans lived on potato peels in the woods. They waded through swamps for so long her skin came off with the boots. They had her run a herd of cows.”

“Cows?” Slava said.

“Cows. I don’t know.”

“What else?”

“What else. She watched a woman in a bunker choke her child to death. There were fascists upstairs. The baby was crying, giving everyone away.” He summed up: “It’s not pleasant.”