A Replacement Life (3 page)

“My condolences, from the bottom,” the man said to Grandfather, covering his heart with his palm. He wore a leather jacket, the lined face of a bricklayer cinched by a short ponytail. A tiny gold hoop roosted in one of the ears. He reached out a grate of hairy knuckles and collected
Grandfather’s limp palm.

“Thank you, Rudik, thanks,” Grandfather said.

“Are you looking?” the man said.

“Yes, yes,” Grandfather said. “We need.”

“Step into the office?”

“This is my grandson,” Grandfather said, turning to Slava.

“Rudolf Kozlovich.” The man extended his hand. “What do you—”

“He’s studying, still,” Grandfather said. “At Harvard.”

In the office, Kozlovich unfurled a bluish map of Lincoln Cemetery. It was a small city with avenues and streets named after trees—Walnut, Maple, Ash. A wide thoroughfare ran through the middle, the train thundering above.

“Nothing by the fence,” Grandfather said.

“They’ve got synthetic lawn on it now,” Kozlovich said. “Like that stuff they put on the soccer field. You can’t see in.”

“Nothing by the fence,” Grandfather repeated.

Kozlovich’s finger traced a line to the other half of the grounds. “The head office is on this side.”

“That means what?”

“The grounds crew checks in there. More people around. Downside is—not too far from the train, either.”

“Where is the quietest?”

“Quiet’s over here.” Kozlovich slid his finger across hundreds of graves. “They’re building new condominiums on that side, but that’s practically over. Tulip Lane.”

“She loved tulips,” Grandfather said.

Kozlovich opened his hands. “Meant to be.”

Rudolf Kozlovich was known. He had come from Odessa in 1977 or 1978. He looked around and settled on a plan. One day he and some hired boys hijacked a truck of Macy’s furs. Sable, mink, fox. They returned them one by one at the branch stores, just a lot of husbands coming back with unsuccessful gifts. They were done, over a hundred thousand dollars between them, before the store could piece together what had happened. With his one hundred thousand, Rudolf purchased one hundred choice plots at the cemetery under the el.

There he was at the hospital, at the funeral home. He had an information network—oncologists, nurses, funeral-home directors—that Macy’s security could only envy. Kozlovich’s business was unofficial, of course, spread among different owners who collected small percentages for the use of their names in the contracts, and the cemetery continued to own some of the plots. But Kozlovich’s were the rarest, and as fewer of them remained, the prices went up.

Kozlovich was on a clock, too. His son Vlad had come out of the closet, renounced his father’s money, and moved with his homosexual partner to Madrid. There, Vlad had reconsidered and agreed to live off Papa’s funds, which Rudolf supplied without objection—when it came to children, his wolfhound instincts went flaccid. But there was no question of Vlad returning to assume any part of his father’s burial empire, and Rudolf’s ex-wife, the former Tatiana Kozlovich, had absconded to Westchester with a derivatives trader who made her former husband seem like a wage worker. Rudolf was alone.

“I want two,” Grandfather said now.

“Yevgeny Isakovich.” Kozlovich’s eyebrows rose. “A plot in advance? You’re tempting fate.”

“Well, that’s what I want,” Grandfather said.

“All right, but I have only four of those left. One family plot and four doubles. The rest is all singles.”

“So give me one of the doubles.”

“Happily. Twenty thousand.”

“Fifteen,” Grandfather said. “I’m buying two in one go.”

“Yevgeny Isakovich,” Kozlovich frowned. “I’m sorry for your loss. But you know I don’t bargain.”

“Fifteen and—your son is in Europe?”

Kozlovich’s face changed expression. “Connection?” he said impatiently.

“Exactly, Rudik,” Grandfather said, his index finger rising tutorially into the refrigerated air of the office. “Connection. Why are we here? For them.” He poked a nail into Slava’s chest. “If this one said, ‘I want Europe,’ I would build the airplane myself. That’s the kind of grandfather I am. But you miss your boy? Exactly. So I am making you an offer. A special kind of telephone. You pick up the receiver and it’s already ringing in Paris.”

“Madrid.”

“Wherever. A special connection just for you and your son. These things, probably the only one who’s got one is Bush. And not that money is an issue for a person such as yourself, but: no charge.”

“A walkie-talkie,” Kozlovich said. “With international range.”

“Exactly. The newest thing.”

“And where did you get such a thing?”

“Rudik,” Grandfather said. Briefly, the sear of grief was gone from his face. His eyes gleamed. “A girl doesn’t tell who she’s kissed. It’s authentic, that’s all you need to know. The Japanese navy uses it, or something like that.”

When the Gelmans reached the United States, Grandfather had found a “warm” fellow who knew where the trucks from Crazy Eddie’s unloaded. The models of the electronics Grandfather obtained—microwaves, dishwashers, floppy disks—were so new and advanced that no one in the family could understand how to use them. Grandfather screamed
into his Pentagon-caliber cordless as if it were a can connected to Slava’s wall by a string. But he could obtain a Japanese navy international-range walkie-talkie in the time it took Slava to find a newspaper.

Kozlovich peered at him. “I have one double left on Tulip,” he said finally.

Grandfather spread his hands. “Meant to be.” From the pocket of his overcoat, which now revealed its purpose, he extracted a Tupperware encasing a snail of hundred-dollar bills. Whispering under their breath, the three mourners counted to 150—once, again, and a third time. Grandfather had not brought a bill more.

When they emerged from the office, Grandfather threaded his arm through Slava’s and spat. “
Homos
. If you’re going to Europe already, who goes to Madrid?” He looked as if he’d swallowed spoiled milk. “
Paris
, Slava. Don’t be a discount aristocrat. Let’s walk.”

–2–

T
he funeral service was conducted by a Borsalino-hatted, bearded whisperer in Orthodox garb who remarked unspecifically, but in Russian and with key references to sections of the Torah that no one in the audience had read, on the passage of Grandmother’s life.

Against the rabbi’s gentle reproaches—“We Jews try to remember the person as living,” he murmured apologetically into his cuff—the coffin had been left open. In it, Grandmother looked unpersuaded of death. Dressed in a long blue nightshirt, her face diplomatic and cautious, she looked as if snoring politely through an afternoon nap. At the rim of the coffin, Slava stifled back tears, the line of mourners humming behind him. Then Uncle Pasha was at his ear, followed by the sweetish scent of used cognac. “You need to keep it together for the sake of the women,” Pasha whispered with sympathetic reproach.

When it was her turn, Slava’s mother fainted. Fixed to his seat, Slava watched several men lift her from the ground. A female guest he didn’t know—feathered mauve hat, a veil falling from the brim—waved a bottle of salts, and she revived with a gasp.

Afterward, by themselves in the car, his father mute behind the wheel and Grandfather staring wetly at the broad emptiness of Ocean Parkway, Mother turned from the front passenger seat and, as if sighting Slava for the first time that day, colored. She’d had to handle by herself both these men, one petulant and the other mute, and he thought he could just appear? Her eyes blazed; she looked as if she wanted to strike him. He wished she would. Instead, a gust of something corrective swept her face clean, and again she looked loving. She lunged toward Slava and began to wail into his shoulder from the front seat, two souls bereaved but together.

Mother had taken from Grandmother the condiments without the meal. She clung to Slava but knew not why and did not ask. Grandmother clung because her previous family had been taken without asking. This one she would hold to faster than iron—with this one, she would make sure to die first, in the natural order. (“It is a blessing to die in the natural order.”—Sofia Gelman.) The mother clung because the grandmother clung. When Slava stopped showing up, it
was only his mother who dialed from New Jersey, badgering and pleading. Grandmother couldn’t, Grandfather was too proud, and Slava’s father had been made docile by his parents-in-law, though he kicked the television once because why did these people control their lives.

At the cemetery, each of the remaining Gelmans shoveled a spadeful of dirt onto the grave, the rabbi chanting a selection in Hebrew that concluded with Grandfather slipping him a white envelope, whereupon God’s messenger vanished into the blurry heat of the evening. The Gelmans stood in front of the pit in a suddenly terrible silence split only by the distant rush of an airplane nosing its way through the atmosphere. Mother and Grandfather grasped each other, two shipwrecks on an island. Slava and his father bracketed them without words.

Berta conveyed her condolences the only way that she could. Two foldout tables
in Grandfather’s living room heaved with plates rimmed in gold filigree: duck with prunes; pickled watermelon; potato pancakes with dill, garlic, and farmer cheese. A dropped fork or a glass emptied of Berta’s trademark cranberry water sent her bulleting into the kitchen with startling litheness. The table droned with the sound of grief mixed with fatigue.

“A woman like her you don’t meet nowadays. Fierce as a—”

“Berta, this
soup . . .
”

“. . . but mark my words, there wasn’t a false bone—”

Slava used to sit at one of these tables once a week, the cooking by a Berta or a Marina or a Tatiana, uniformly ambrosial, as if they all attended the same Soviet Culinary School No. 1. Stout women, preparing to grow outward even if they hadn’t reached thirty, in tights decorated with polka dots or rainbow splotches, the breasts falling from their sailor shirts, their shirts studded with rhinestones, their shirts that said Gabbana & Dulce.

Stewed eggplant; chicken steaks in egg batter; marinated peppers with buckwheat honey; herring under potatoes, beets, carrots, and mayonnaise; bow-tie pasta with kasha, caramelized onions, and garlic;
ponchiki
with mixed-fruit preserves; pickled cabbage; pickled eggplant; meat in aspic; beet salad with garlic and mayonnaise; kidney beans with walnuts;
kharcho
and
solyanka
; fried cauliflower; whitefish under stewed carrots; salmon soup; kidney beans with the walnuts swapped out for caramelized onions; sour cabbage with beef; pea soup with corn; vermicelli and fried onions.

On the phone, Grandfather would want to know when Slava would come visit, but when Slava was there at last, the old man would tiptoe off to the television, Grandmother scowling at him. Then she, too, would become tired and, making apologies, shuffle off to bed, her house
shoes scraping the parquet. Slava was left with the home attendant. As the day declined and Grandfather made faces at the television, they would compare notes on his grandparents.

“Slava?” Mother said now from the other side of the table. “You’re all right?” The skin under her eyes was inflamed.

“Yes,” he nodded. “Of course.”

“What are you thinking about?”

“Nothing.”

“I wonder if someone will say a toast,” she said resentfully.

Slava surveyed the table. Grandfather’s call-around had netted all the significant relatives. Uncle Pasha and Aunt Viv; the girls from the pharmacy where his mother worked; the Schneyersons; Benya Zeltzer and clan.

Even two Rudinskys. The Rudinskys held a special place in Grandfather’s catalog of wayward relations. The Gelmans and Rudinskys had come through immigration together, had been assigned to the same guesthaus in Austria, where their documents were processed, and down the block from each other in Italy, where they were processed some more. Vera Rudinsky and Slava Gelman had played supermarket together. They cut cucumbers out of green construction paper, raised a crop of goose bumps on the skin with black marker, and sold them to their parents for prices just below those of the real vegetable market on Via Tessera. Their parents and grandparents laughed, counting out lira, and when the children were gone to restock the shelves of V&S Alimenti, they made jokes about all the money their children would make in America, followed by wordless glances that said: Together? Maybe together.

Money works both ways. After arriving in America, Vera’s father had asked Grandfather for a loan to invest in a limo fleet. Grandfather didn’t like to part with money unless he could count on interest, and he couldn’t bring himself to ask that of the Rudinskys, who had shared with the Gelmans months of stateless dread amid the perverse beauty of Mitteleuropa and the Tyrrhenian seashore. The Rudinskys retreated. No scenes; they just called less and less. Grandfather refused to call until called.

However, the Rudinskys would not disrespect Grandmother’s memory. When the men went off to the secondhand market near Rome to pawn what they’d lugged from Minsk, and the women to the firsthand market to spend on provisions what the men made in the secondhand, it was Grandmother who remained with the children, walking them to the pebbly beach, where they splashed around in the bottle-green Mediterranean water. It was she who supervised the children as they distended their bellies with translucent muscat grapes that looked as if filaments of sun had lodged inside. (Grandmother did not touch the grapes. The grapes, expensive, were for the children.) It was Grandmother who tucked the children to sleep, though she didn’t read stories. She ran her fingers, the skin flimsy and loose, through their hair until they calmed down and dozed off.

All the same, to indicate displeasure, the Rudinsky high command had sent low-level envoys: Vera had come with her grandfather. The parents (Garik, taxi driver; Lyuba, bookkeeper) had claimed night shifts. It wasn’t enough for Grandfather. Slava watched the old man’s eyes roll past Vera and her grandfather Lazar, a scowl on his lips.

Slava stared at Lazar. He was stooped as a branch being reclaimed by the ground. In the town near Rome where Soviet immigrants were settled en route to America by some unknown geopolitical contract, Lazar Timofeyevich Rudinsky remained a legend years after the Rudinskys had departed for Brooklyn. The secondhand market was such that people came from Rome itself. Those who had gone through Italy before the Rudinskys and Gelmans sent word about what Italians wanted from their strange interlopers: linen sheets, Lenin pins, cologne, Zenit cameras. Also power drills, cognac, and Red Army caps. Every morning, the Soviet men shrouded themselves in Soviet linens and mongreled into the soft air of Tyrrhenian fall: “Russo producto! Russo producto!”