A Replacement Life (6 page)

As the adults watched, Slava checked the unfamiliar words in the bricktionary. “Annual percentage rate.” “Layaway.” “Installment plan.” “One time only.” “For special customers like you.” The senior Gelmans waiting, Slava was embarrassed to discover himself mindlessly glued to certain words in the dictionary that had nothing to do with the task at hand. On the way to “credit card,” he had snagged on “cathedral,” its spires—t, h, d, l—like the ones the Gelmans had seen in Vienna. “Rebate” took him to “roly-poly,” which rolled around his mouth like a fat marble. “Venture rewards” led him to “zaftig,” a Russian
baba
’s breasts covering his eyes as she placed in front of him a bowl of morning farina. Eventually, he managed to verify enough to reassure the adults that, no, it didn’t seem like a letter from James Baker III. The senior Gelmans sighed, shook their heads, resumed frying fish.

Slava remained with the bricktionary. Hinky, lunker, wattles. Taro, terrazzo, toodle-oo. “Levity” became a Jewish word because Levy was a Jewish surname in America. “Had had”—knock-knock—was a door. A “gewgaw” was a “gimcrack,” and a “gimcrack” was “folderol.” “Sententious” could mean two opposite things, and wasn’t to be confused with “senescent,” “tendentious,” or “sentient.” Nor “eschatological” with “scatological.” This language placed the end of the world two letters away from the end of a bowel movement.

Russian words were as stretchy as the meat under Grandmother’s arm. You could invent new endings and they still made sense. Like peasants fidgeting with their ties at a wedding, the words wanted to unlace into diminutives: Mikhail into Mishen’ka (little Misha),
kartoshka
into
kartoshechka
(little potato). English was colder, clipped, a brain game. But English was brilliant. For some reason, in the bedroom, all this gave him skin against Grandfather.

Grandfather grunted and, avoiding Slava’s eyes, rose. Downstairs, a salsa had started up, the dull bass making the same point over and over. Moving toward the door, Grandfather shuddered and lost his stride, reaching out his arms as if he were going to slip. But seeing no help rushing from his grandson, he got his hand on the bureau, righted himself, and walked out.

–3–

T
he east-facing wall of the Spartak Dance Club was not, strictly speaking, any longer a wall. Three quarters of Minsk had been bombed into rubble, which explains why it’s so ugly today, rebuilt after the war in the socialist style. But even before victory was declared over the Germans, the Saturday-night dances at the Spartak Dance Club had resumed. The people needed dances as much as bread, Stalin had said. The entire country rushed to reopen its dance halls, those villages without one scrounging to convert something, anything, that could hold a gramophone and a dance platform. Two months after V-E Day, the Spartak Dance Club in Minsk was back in regular operation despite remaining in possession of only three walls, which meant that Sofia Dreitser’s older sister Galina wouldn’t be attending the Saturday-night dances because, in her view, the other walls could go crumbling at any moment, and then that would be a pretty costly dance, wouldn’t it.

But Sofia loved to dance. She had to be more careful nowadays, with no father or brother or mother to look after her, and men back from the war with a hollowed-out look in their eyes and a hunger that even a woman’s hand paled beside. So she danced by herself or with a female friend. That was the concession Galina had managed to extract from her wild younger sister; Sofia would go to the dances only if accompanied by Rusya, the Slav girl next door, who joked to Galina with her characteristic coarseness, “You don’t mind your sister dead if the walls crumble, so long as she doesn’t get raped?” But Rusya went along, and twirl she and Sofia did, casting longing glances at the army captains back from the front in their uniforms, and at the neighborhood boys, who in the span of four years had become men. There was Misha Surokin, the half-moon of a scar running down the right side of his face; and Yevgeny Gelman, the hooligan from Sofia’s neighborhood, looking as unserious as she remembered him; and Pavlik Sukhoi, a facial tic he had acquired in the war making him wince twice a sentence. They were the same but not the same.

And so when the waltz started up on this Saturday night, it was Sofia and Rusya, approximating the moves best as they could from the films they had seen before the war,
imagining themselves in some grand castle in Austria, switching up the lead every minute or so, Sofia pretending strict indifference toward the men leering from the perimeter of the dance club, Rusya sending them coquettish smiles.

But it was Sofia whom the men were looking at, unblemished skin and two ponytails like cables—Rusya had been blessed with a farmer’s fearlessness but also a farmer’s face. During a break for boysenberry punch (no alcohol was served, which meant the men had to sneak it in flasks and seltzer bottles, going outside for swigs out of respect for the women), while Rusya was distracted by a bowlegged lieutenant, one of the army captains wandered over to Sofia.

It was as the rule has it: It’s the brave ones who get the girl, and bravery has nothing to do with looks; they had the courage to approach. Captain Tereshkin had one such plain face, his chin fading imperceptibly into his neck, halfhearted stubble crowning his jowls. No matter the searing July heat, even starved evacuees sporting healthyish tan glows, Tereshkin was as pale as snow. Who knows what overtook Sofia in that moment; we nurture our defenses, and in a moment of consequence, they simply don’t show. Maybe she wanted to feel a man’s arms around her; maybe she felt sorry for Tereshkin, because probably he was motherless, sisterless, childless; maybe she simply got tired of saying no. All she knew was that she was dancing the next dance with him, a Rosner jazz tune, Rusya all eyes at her lieutenant, whose own eyes were beginning to wander. Even Sofia, busy with Tereshkin, could see that.

When the curfew bell rang—it was ten o’clock, things still on edge—Captain Tereshkin asked if he could escort Sofia home. It was dark, barely any functioning streetlamps. Maybe that was all he wanted, a gentleman, and Galina would be home in case he tried to push his way in. The way there was long, however, and Sofia wasn’t about to take chances. She had danced with him, yes, but because a woman danced with a man, that meant she had to thank him with her body? All the same, she didn’t want to insult the captain—because she had danced with him all evening, because maybe he had meant nothing by it, because she was a little bit scared. That was when the idea came to her. She disliked it almost as much as she disliked the idea of having pale-faced Captain Tereshkin accompany her home, and she minced in place, smiling dumbly at Tereshkin while she tried to think of something else. But nothing else would come—her cleverness tended to abandon her these days, as if she had used up her life’s allotted supply during the war, staying alive. What a pitiful amount she had been granted, she thought. It hadn’t been enough to save anyone but her and her sister. All these thoughts—comically, stupidly—flashed through her mind. Oh, Captain, she thought, if only you knew what you were taking on—an orphan with one dress between her and her sister, because the rest of their clothes, given them by the Red Cross, had been stolen and pawned by the Belarusian collaborator who continued to occupy half their home. Sofia wore it now, not so much a dress as a sarafan, the kind of thing her mother wore before the war to clean the house.

Finally, Sofia excused herself to go to the bathroom, which meant the bushes outside, but the
bushes outside would take her past Zhenya Gelman, laughing with his friends in a circle and taking swigs from a bottle with no label, too late in the evening to bother with outside.

Zhenya Gelman was known in the neighborhood. What he was known for was another story. “A child of other people’s gardens,” people called him before the war. A hooligan, not to say a criminal. He got what needed to be got, whether it was beets from old Ferbershteyn’s garden or a set of silver spoons from God knows whom, and you could do yourself a favor by not worrying how.

Sofia was glad to see Zhenya alive, as glad as she would have been for a brother, but she had nothing to do with boys like him before the war, and she would have less to do with them now. Boys like him would be in prison before they turned twenty. Even as she approached him that night, her mind ran with what else she could do, but she had nothing. Her mind was like a still clock. She was impressed with herself for coming up even with this. Besides, Zhenya had a girlfriend. He had ten girlfriends. Maybe he wouldn’t want anything from her in return.

She stood behind him for nearly a minute before his friends noticed her and their expressions changed. He spun around. “Sofia Dreitser,” he observed, the smile on his face hanging awkwardly.

“Can I talk to you?” she said.

A couple of chuckles followed from the boys behind him, but he half turned and the laughter fell from their faces. Zhenya and Sofia stepped to the side. He placed his hand on her shoulder and leaned in solemnly, but she gave him such a look that his hand returned to his side.

“There’s a captain over there,” she started.

“Tereshkin,” he said.

Her eyes opened wide in surprise.

“The eyes of a reconnaissance man!” Zhenya said with his usual self- regard.

Quite a comment to make, considering Zhenya had been evacuated out east, then had the age on his identity card revised down until the war was nearly over, then, when finally drafted, had finagled his way onto a ship in liberated territory as a radio operator. Zhenya Gelman knew as much about radio operation as she did, but how to get to safe places when the world around him was ending, that he knew how to do better than anyone.

“Let me guess,” he said. “The captain wants to take you home.”

She blushed and looked down.

“You know, you look like a just-hatched chick in that sarafan of yours,” he said.

“Thank you very much, Zhenya,” she said angrily.

“And so you came to Zhenya the thug to help you out of your bind,” he said. “Not a word for me when things are hopping along, but when trouble comes . . .” The sentence was half out of his mouth when he realized what he was saying, the idiot, her entire family in the ground and she didn’t even know where. When it came time to liquidate the Minsk orphanage, the Nazis
walked the children into a giant hole in the earth and covered their living bodies with sand. They tossed candies to them as their tiny hands reached out for help. That was what the Nazis did to children. So she hoped her parents and her grandfather had been merely shot. She didn’t know how they had died, which was what made her nights endless, but if it was known, it was known only in some army or KGB office, and those places she hoped never to see.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Come with me.”

“Zhenya,” she said, “I am grateful to you for the help. But I can’t thank you. You understand what I mean.”

“You’ve already insulted me once,” he said. “Don’t insult me twice.”

When Captain Tereshkin felt an arm around his waist, he brightened, thinking it was Sofia’s; the smile changed to surprise when it turned out to belong to Zhenya Gelman, “a child of other people’s gardens,” someone who was known to the neighborhood, and known to him, Tereshkin having grown up several blocks away.

“Captain!” Zhenya yelled. He took Tereshkin’s hand in his. “I have to pour you a glass.”

“W-why?” Tereshkin said.

“Because you’ve kept my lady company all night long. It was a gentlemanly thing to do—never let a lady stand alone. So I owe you. What do you drink? You know I specialize in Armenian cognac.”

Tereshkin turned red as a sugar beet. He had half a dozen years on Gelman, and their bodies were of similar cast, but Gelman had boxed before the war, and in any case, you didn’t fight with Zhenya Gelman.

“Zhenya,” he said, his face falling. “I’m sorry. I had no idea. Really. You have to believe me.”

“But that’s what I’m saying!” Zhenya said. “You’re a good man, and I want to thank you.” Zhenya practically made him drink the cognac. They sucked on the same piece of lemon afterward, Zhenya gallantly giving Tereshkin first taste. They toasted the motherland, then the women around them. There were no women like Russian women. Russian women were made from freshly milked milk, and the rest of the world’s women from water. It didn’t matter were they Jewish or not—Zhenya couldn’t resist forcing the captain to agree with this notion. Russian women were chocolate, like the loam under their feet; they were the butter that went on their bread; the red poppies that swayed in the wind. To Russian women!

“It seems I should walk my girlfriend home, don’t you think?” Zhenya said to Sofia after Tereshkin had freed himself from Zhenya’s clutches and, pleading curfew, run off. Zhenya winked. Already he had acquired somewhere a gold tooth, as was the fashion.

“I don’t know if your real girlfriend would appreciate that,” Sofia said.

“Who’s that?” he said.

“Oh, you can’t keep them straight,” she said. “Ida. Or whatever her name is.”

“Ida?” he said, his eyebrows rising. “I ditched Ida like a sack of potatoes. I asked her to join tonight. She says: ‘My teeth hurt.’ How do you like that? I was gone like a comet. Sparks coming
out from under my feet. You could light a cigarette off my boot heel. Her teeth hurt!”

“Ida.” Sofia smirked. “Ida, whose father distributes beer and vodka for the whole city. Millionaire Ida. You ditched her.”

“I ditched her,” he said proudly.

“Well, even I’m impressed,” she said.

“So, what do you say?” he said. “It’s insulting that I have to say it, but I got nothing in mind. I just want to see you home safe. We lived fourteen houses from each other before the war. We’re practically family.”

“How in the world do you know how many houses we lived from each other?”

“Because I counted,” he said.

Sofia was right about one thing, though only partly. Zhenya did go to prison, but it wasn’t before he turned twenty; he was already twenty-one. Several years after the dance, they were returning from another dance club with friends when they heard from the other side of the street: “Look at those kikes! Would have been nice to have some of that energy at the front, kikes!” She said sternly, “Zhenya, no,” but he was already crossing. It wasn’t because he was drunk; he would have done the same thing if he had been sober, as he would for the rest of their lives, so while she never knew whether her husband would end his day in her bed or a prison cell, she always knew that it would be without lost pride. Zhenya carried a straight razor for occasions exactly like this one. He cut up the fellow pretty bad. Zhenya’s father bribed the judge, so he got only a year instead of three. They were starting to build the soccer stadium around that time, so that was how he repaid his debt to society. Though Zhenya never mentioned it to his grandson Slava, his own hands had poured the concrete for the seats where they sat every week, shouting after Gotsman and Aleinikov.