A Replacement Life (39 page)

W
hat do the holy books say about the paying of respects to the deceased on the Sabbath? Is it a form of work, prohibited on the sacred day, or a kind of rest? There is no Arianna to ask. Slava might not be long for the answers, but he will look them up anyway. He has to get ready to teach those who come after him.

From the train platform, the rows of headstones look like children gathered for an assembly. Up close, the graves of the American Jews are as unlike the Russian as two siblings whose parents scratch their heads, wondering how the children turned out so differently. The American graves are enormous slabs, saying only: “Fisher b. 1877 d. 1956.” The Russian are smaller but make up with ornament: scalloped shoulders, roses climbing the panels, multipeaked crowns, and on the stones themselves, beneath suns setting on menorahs that the family of the deceased never lit while he was alive, inscriptions:

“We miss you, dear one, like the earth misses the rain.”

“Words have little room, but thoughts fly free.”

“An evil whirlwind has passed above this earth and taken you into that other world.”

“Little son, why did you leave us so soon?”

The mortuary Seurat who has etched the face of this last unlucky addressee in a pointillist style rendered even his incipient mustache. Eighteen years old. Auto accident. He is the cup and saucer who broke on arrival, the rest of the set having to carry on incomplete. It is a blessing to die in the natural order.

You can tell the anniversaries by the heaps of flowers. The cemetery has set out notices about stagnant water and West Nile virus, so the flowers are mostly plastic, a rare act of civic obedience. These last longer and require less maintenance anyway.

You can tell the new graves by the eight-by-elevens, encased in cellophane to defend from rain, wedged into humps of freshly turned earth. A Soviet-Jewish family tends not to wait a year
before unveiling a tombstone, as Jewish custom dictates, but neither does it erect one immediately, as it would have in the Soviet Union. It strikes a murky compromise between worlds whose logic is clear only to its members: one month or two.

Slava’s secret descendant, he of the beer can and the accentless tongue, how long will he wait? There is a Hasidic belief that three generations of deceased ancestors keep watch over the newlyweds under a chuppah. Slava wants an inversion of this teaching—three generations of unborn descendants keeping watch over a grave. As he strides down Tulip Row A, approaching Grandmother’s plot, flowerless but with a notebook in hand, they wait for him by her stone.

How will I explain to you how we lived, there and here? There, our evenings spent in some living room—for there was really nowhere to go—fearful but safe, insecure but joyful, guarded but open? And here, the reused paper towels, the boxes of instruction manuals saved for some future loss of direction, the receipts organized in an accounting of every indulgence?

But you must know these things, for you will replace me as I am replacing them.

In the distance, a mower whines in the hands of a groundskeeper. Behind the noise, you can hear—after all—the train running its fingers across the ribs of the tracks. It comes through the pavement and into your feet.

The pair of tombstones in front of Slava grows apart only at the hips. Gelman, the common plinth says. Grandfather’s is blank; Grandmother’s has the poem. Her face is etched in the same pointillist style; the local Seurat must have a monopoly. Grandfather’s stone is black, Grandmother’s the stippled chestnut of a bay horse. The crown of his stone rises slightly above hers, a shoulder.

The turf is even on both sides of the plot, flecks of freshly cut grass clinging to the knees of the common stone. The custodians must have mowed since Grandfather and Berta last visited; Grandfather wouldn’t permit the flecks to remain, Berta nicking them away with her mother-of-pearl nails.

Slava sits down on the paved path that runs alongside the plots and gives his greeting to Grandmother. He decides that she does not need small talk. They will talk in a different way. He would like to meet her all over again, their recent encounters untrue. How? He opens his notebook. A blank page looks at him with doubt. Doubt enough of his own he’s got. He touches a pen to the paper, moves it off, brings it back. His untrustworthy imagination whispers to him, the sound of new treason. He listens, waits, listens, brings pen to paper again.

It isn’t her, because she never spoke like this. But she is no longer around to answer for herself. And so she will have to live on in the adulterated form in which he must imagine her. He cannot strip himself out of the imagining. If she is to live, she will live as Slava+Grandmother, one person at last.

“Boy! Boy!” a woman shouts as she rushes down the path, the plea of a fist in the air. She is already clothed for winter—a heavy coat, a beret on her head. “Boy,” she repeats as she draws near, out of breath. “How could you sit on the pavement like that? You will catch cold, and then what? How would your”—she squints at the grave, considers the years of birth and death—“how would your grandmother like that? Answer me.”

Slava smiles and rises. “Thank you,” he says.

“The weather’s changing,” she says. “That’s always the vulnerable time. Look after yourself. God bless you for looking in on your grandmother.”

After she disappears down an alleyway, Slava returns to the ground, though not to the pavement; after all, he has promised. He comes down to the grass, to Grandfather’s unused side of the plot, next to Grandmother. The pavement already holds the chill of autumn, but the grass is still heedless and warm, as if summer is never going to end. He thinks of Arianna, the singed grass of Bryant Park underneath them, his head on her thigh, the saxophone going off
at the other end of the park, the ordinariness that hides the miraculous.

The world above is endless and blue. Slava runs his fingers through Grandmother’s side of the plot, the short, prickly grass like Grandfather’s face after a day without shaving. Her pliant, puckered flesh was so inadequate to protect the fragile body beneath it that the last time she had enough strength to go out, the sons of another family—each the size of a bureau, each overjoyed to see her well enough to come for a party—embraced her so fervidly that they broke two of her ribs.

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.

M
y 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.

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T
he 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).