A Replacement Life (34 page)

“Schumer,” Slava invented. “The senator from New York.”

“Not Kennedy?” Grandfather said disappointedly.

“Not Kennedy,” Slava said, spreading his arms in apology.

“Well, anyway,” Grandfather said. “This Shuma wanted them to write a book together, you see.”

As Grandfather talked on, Slava ran his free palm through Grandfather’s hair. It felt different than Slava expected, rough and dry instead of silky and ageless. That memory of it, Slava realized, was a decade old.

Slava knew why Grandfather kept a hand at his neck: a talisman. Against undefined rasps in the throat, against illness, against death. Slava wanted to pry it away, return it to the lap of Grandfather’s natty corduroys, to Grandfather’s forehead, so it could keep the mental abacus warm as Grandfather made his calculations: No, it’s not too late for him to become a businessman, not late at all . . .

One morning after Grandmother’s death, Berta had found Grandfather in bed surrounded by a moat of chairs, the backs facing him. “No, no, no,” Berta exclaimed, rushing the bed. “You can’t, you can’t.” He didn’t know how they’d gotten there.

Maybe Grandfather had begun covering his neck long before Grandmother died, only Slava hadn’t been around to notice. Maybe, while Slava was gone, Grandfather got old, his lying mind his only health. If you can invent, you must be alive still. Grandfather
is
. What would Grandfather tell Otto Barber?

Slava knew. Grandfather would shrug. He would express the deepest desire to help. Unfortunately, he had no information to offer but would as soon as he heard anything, naturally. Grandfather would let the letters go to Herr Schuler, may they all get covered up to their heads. And Grandmother would look on approvingly from the side. How else could it be? If she had wanted Grandfather to stop, she would have made him. Slava didn’t know many things about her, but he knew her power. And she didn’t stop Grandfather. Why would she have? To a friend she would not lie, but to the law she would not tell the truth. (What law? Where was the law when the Minsk ghetto was being “liquidated” along with her mother, father, and grandfather?) For a person like Grandmother, there was no law but what we find in each other. And Grandfather was the man she had found.
Slava lived in a different country. A lie meant something different here, even if it was easier to pull off thanks to the American insistence on imagining the best about the next person. It wasn’t difficult at all to lie here, Slava had discovered with some regret, as it devalued his duplicities compared to Grandfather’s. Slava’s new country asked less of his ingenuity than the Soviet Union had asked of his grandfather. It would take nothing for Slava to deceive Otto Barber.

Slava patted Grandfather on his no longer silky hair and kissed his forehead, the kind gesture allowing Grandfather, in the calculus of affection demonstrated to Regina Alekseevna, to release Slava’s arm. What if Slava, naive Slava—his grandfather would run circles around him until his last day—had it backward about Grandfather’s friends? What if Grandfather
wanted
to have them in his life but couldn’t because he had lied about his age during the war to delay the draft? He told big stories about needing to mind the official records in Moscow or Minsk, but it was the Katznelsons, Kogans, and Rubinshteins that he had to continue to fool, to persuade that simply he had been too young for the draft in 1943, the year that was “cut down” in full: the year Dodik Katznelson lost a brother, Grisha Kogan three brothers, and Nina Rubinshtein enough cousins to fill a village, as they had before the war. The Katznelsons, Kogans, and Rubinshteins were Grandfather’s undisappearing accounting, long after he had disappeared from the Soviet Union. He hated them for it. This was why no one appeared in his home. He didn’t want anyone there, stumbling accidentally on the truth.

He couldn’t explain it this way to Slava, so he invented their insults, their distance. He kept inventing and inventing, unable to stop, until he had ended up alone, without friends, without his grandson. He had survived the war at the price of punishing himself for the rest of his life with the lie that had made it possible. Vera had saved Grandfather with the Rudinskys. Had tricked him when no one else could, granted him reconciliation without requiring a reckoning. Slava had saved him with the rest.

It was close to midnight by the time the guests started to leave. There were long kisses, embraces inside humid necklines, unmeant promises to call regularly now.

Slava watched Vera help her grandfather Lazar into his jacket. Lazar’s eyes were empty. He trembled as Vera walked him down the hallway, a branch quaking in the wind. When he pulled even with Slava in the line of farewell-wishers—Mother, Father, Berta subbing for Grandmother, Grandfather, Slava—Lazar lifted a trembling hand and clasped Slava’s, pulling it gently. He was phlox-colored, the skin stale and soft, the mouth in decay. Closer, closer, he gestured. Slava placed his ear next to Lazar’s spittle-covered mouth, thinking he wished to say something, but Lazar only turned his face until it was even with Slava’s cheek and kissed him there, his lips flat and dry. They left no trace except what Slava imagined.

“Here,” Lazar said. “Here.” He lifted his right hand, gnarled and shivering, and wedged a piece of material into Slava’s hand. In Slava’s hand was a rectangle of white cloth with an address, the kind Jews in the Minsk ghetto were required to wear underneath their yellow stars. It said: “54 Krymskaya.” And underneath: “Rudinsky.”

“My great-grandmother,” Vera said, leaning into be heard. “Grandfather’s mother.” Slava could smell her perfume, jasmine and honey. She spoke to him in Russian, so Lazar could understand. Her English was plain, colorless, sometimes even incorrect, but her Russian—at least to Slava’s ears, because she owned it far better than he—was as elegant as a palace. He felt overseen by it; for a passing moment, the two of them felt unnoticeable in the most crowded place in the apartment.

“This is a hallway, not a dance club!” someone farther back in line said half jokingly.

“Why don’t you let the youth speak, cow!” Lazar said with startling vigor. And then, under his breath, “If you lost some weight, you wouldn’t have trouble squeezing past.”

Vera and Slava laughed. “He wants you to have it, that’s all,” she said.

“Do you have to go?” Slava blurted out.

She thought about the answer but not long. “There’s a bar close to where I live,” she said. She gave him the name. “I’ll wait for you there.”

The bar had bordello-red velvet couches and multiple television screens showing
sports. They were the only ones there; the bartender, a young woman wearing an olive-green tank top and leather bands on both wrists, was flipping through a magazine.

“What are you thinking about?” Vera said. She sat in a high-backed banquette, her back arched, the edge of her skirt lapping her knees.

“Someone I wrote a letter for,” Slava said. “He wasn’t there tonight.”

“You spend a lot of time with old people now,” she said.

“You said they are lonely,” he said.

“Let’s bring you back to young-people time,” she said. “Let’s dance.”

“Here?” he said. There was a sneering song coming out of the speakers.

“Wait,” she said. She rose and walked over to the bartender. A moment later, the music changed.

“I think she wanted to close,” Slava said when Vera returned.

“You just need the charm,” Vera said.

“You have an effect on men and women both.”

“Stop talking, Slava. Let’s go.”

The song was slow. In a blue something. Slava’s arms slid neatly into a crevice in the small of Vera’s back. The bartender lifted her eyes, winked at Slava, and returned to her magazine. It wasn’t the kind of bar where people danced.

“Do you remember,” Vera said, “when you smacked your face in the window in Vienna?”

Slava tried to remember, but all he could recall about Vienna was the synagogue, cobblestones, Grandfather. All the other slots in the slide projector showed empty.

“We were just walking around,” she said. “You stopped because you saw these kitchen pots in a store window. They were very beautiful, with designs on the side in bright color. You started walking toward them because I think you wanted to touch them. And then—bam!” Vera’s palm met Slava’s forehead softly. “The window was so clean, you didn’t understand there was a window there.”

They both laughed. Slava wanted to remember. He liked being the person who gave her such satisfaction.

She leaned into Slava’s chest. “You are so serious now,” she said, so quietly that perhaps she didn’t wish him to hear.

“That’s not true,” he said.

“Prove it you are not,” she said, looking up at him.

He pulled away, lifted her, and twirled her in his arms, her skirt making an accordion in the air. She yelped. The bartender looked up and smiled again.

They walked to Vera’s apartment. The streetlights ticked and buzzed, playing with one another in the cool night. It was practically September. In this neighborhood, Slava had never walked to a home at such a late hour, only from. In the last month, he had spent more nights around here than in the preceding two years, but always he left well before now.

Slava remembered only one thing clearly about Vienna, from the afternoon he had peeked inside the Vienna synagogue from behind Grandfather’s pants leg, Austrians streaming past them. How could they walk by so indifferently, Slava had thought, if they once wished to exterminate all the people inside? Slava felt shame for the worshippers. He didn’t want to look at them because it would have connected him with their destruction. That was when Grandfather made them disappear with a release of the door, a finger in his temple to say they were crazy. All the knots in Slava’s stomach gave way.

The Gelmans managed to leave the Soviet Union only because all sides had agreed to pretend that they were going to Israel. The Soviet government wouldn’t release Soviet citizens directly to the United States. But it would release its Jews to Israel, “family reunification” being less humiliating to the USSR as the refugees’ reason for emigration than discontent with socialism. If there was no family in Israel, as there usually wasn’t, it was manufactured. Scribes popped up to supply people like the Gelmans with an Aunt Chaya in Haifa and a Cousin Mumik in Ashdod. These invented Chayas and Mumiks filled out affidavits in the scribe’s hand requesting the Soviet government to release their relatives. The Soviet visa office quietly acquiesced.

Intermediary countries—Austria, Italy—facilitated the deception; after all the invention, the refugees couldn’t very well fly from Sheremetyevo to JFK. So the Gelmans took the long, slow train to Vienna, a month later another to Italy, several months later the airplane to New York. At every step, everyone had lied about everything so the one truth at the heart of it all—that
abused people might flee the place of abuse—could be told.

Grandfather was already a liar—this kind of liar—when he twirled his finger in his temple that afternoon in Vienna, and Slava was young enough to understand such lies as a better kind of truth. It wasn’t until they’d come to America that the truth started to mean exactly what was said and not something else. The calculus had changed in America. Here you could afford a thirty-two-inch television on a doorman’s salary, as Bart at the front desk kept finding ways to mention. Here you could afford to be decent.

If you find yourself on one of the lower-alphabet avenues in South Brooklyn
—Avenue U, Avenue Z—you are sure to come across a furniture emporium. Russian-owned, Europe-minded. Collezione Eleganza, La Moda, and, to reassure those concerned that Europe-minded means Europe-priced, Discount European Furniture Warehouse. Inside, you will find leather couches with armrests wide enough to serve as ottomans, in elusive shades of tan and ocher. You will find lacquered tables with tapered legs and faux-sapphire inlays; paintings in every color but primary; and curves, everywhere curves.

Vera’s bookshelves curved. Her lampshades curved. Her fridge would have curved if only the maker obliged. The balcony, where Vera’s tour of the apartment ended, was covered with synthetic grass and additional leather furniture.

“It doesn’t get ruined when it rains?” Slava asked as they surveyed the neighboring homes, the occasional clothesline breaking the baked tar of the roofs. The ground floors were for dirt, exhaust, and cheap living. It was soundless and cool up here in the clouds.

“I cover it with plastic every morning before I go to work,” she said.

“But if you go away somewhere?”

“I don’t go anywhere.”

Out of her intimidating freezer, Vera withdrew an ice-encrusted bottle of vodka. The ice on the bottle sparkled like diamonds, and the clear liquid poured from it thickly, a clear honey.

They clinked, downed in one gulp, and gnawed on frozen strawberries while listening to the quiet. Slava stood at the dark window. On the other side, Brooklyn made the sounds of sleep. The early morning and the night, those were his favorite times, before everything began and after it ended.

“I can’t tell,” he said, “if this is real or it’s because you and I cut vegetables out of construction paper together in Italy. Because you remember things about me that even I don’t remember. Because when I say ‘Grandfather,’ you think the same thing I think.”

“That is what means it is real,” she said from the sectional.

“We cut vegetables out of construction paper and made our parents pay in real money. Your grandfather with the secondhand market in Italy. My letters, your press conference. All we do is lie. Germans make Volvos, at least. We lie.”

“Volvos are from Sweden,” she said, and asked him to join her on the couch.

He continued to look out the window. “They know about the letters,” he said at last. “Where the applications go.”

“What does that mean?” she said, her voice stern. “Look at me, please.”

“Someone ratted,” Slava said, turning around.

She was squinting against the light, trying to get this new lay of the land. Her shoulders fell. “One of ours did it?” she said. Her worry was convincing. Was it expert? Was she acting, covering up for her mother? He hated himself for the thought, but was it unreasonable? He had seen her in action.