A Replacement Life (30 page)

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 saying 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.

O
n 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 the 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?”

The cameraman whom Settledecker was pointing to uncoupled his face from his viewfinder. “The Bronx,” he shouted up to the stage.

“The Bronx!” Settledecker repeated. The prisoners filed behind him, professional grief in their faces, their bodies tired and slumped. They didn’t know what was being said. Someone had told them that doing this might get them money. In their heads, calculations were being made about what those euros could buy. A new car for the son-in-law. And a limousine medallion. Enough to help the children get a down payment together, because everyone else’s children already owned a home. They would crawl across the dais if that’s what it took.

“The Bronx is an internment camp, my friend,” Settledecker went on. “Your family—you got a family, sir?”

“Two kids,” the cameraman shouted. There was a bored practice to his tone.

“Two kids,” Settledecker said. “And a wife who brought them into the world, I presume?” He paused again for mild laughter. “Well, they are in Camp Bronx. But—last question, sir, I promise—your name?”

“Joseph Rumana,” the cameraman said. “Junior. You want to know what we’re having for dinner?”

The other cameramen laughed. Settledecker smiled tolerantly into the microphone. “
Thank you
, sir.”

The cameraman cocked a finger at Settledecker and pulled the trigger. He was a plant.

“The Rumanas are rounded up. But Mr. Rumana—loving husband and father—finds a way for his family to slip out, leaving him alone in the camp. His wife and children spend the next four years wandering the country, living off scraps, fending off attack, suffering the worst kind of humiliation—because by now there are people in Utah and Texas who say, ‘Let them have New York. Then they’ll leave us alone.’ The war is so long, Mr. Rumana’s boys become old enough to join the U.S. Army. In trenches they fight. Mrs. Rumana works twenty-hour shifts in a factory, making munitions.

“It’s like this for years, ladies and gentlemen,” Settledecker went on. “
Years
. When it’s over, there used to be eight million in New York. Now there are two. Imagine this city with two million people. I know, I know—room to walk. But I’m serious. Miraculously, Mr. Rumana has survived. He weighs a third of what he used to, he’s sick with things medicine has yet to describe, he’s seen things that none of us can imagine. But he’s alive. For decades, Mr. Rumana must agitate against the German government to have a value put on his suffering. Can it be measured in numbers? That’s not for us to answer.” Settledecker pointed an index finger at the sky. He was warmed up now, swaying.

“But something that we
do
have to ponder: German restitution covers only Mr. Rumana. That’s right—everything that his wife and his boys went through, all because New York was invaded by Germans, and they won’t see a cent. Sixty years later! Mrs. Rumana is eighty-seven years old! These are her last days on earth. She has gout, arthritis, glaucoma. From day after
day working in the dark, casting artillery shells. But no! The generous German government doesn’t cover anyone who wasn’t—I quote to you from the official documents—‘incarcerated in concentration camps, ghettos, or forced labor battalions.’ Shame, ladies and gentlemen!” Settledecker was thundering, his cheeks quivering. “Shame!” he bellowed, and for a moment it was easy to imagine that there was no act in his speech. He blinked several times, his words echoing. The survivors had finished filing past him. They milled on the other side of the dais, unsure what to do.