A Replacement Life (7 page)

Sofia Dreitser waited faithfully until Zhenya Gelman was released from prison. Her worst imaginings about him had come true, but once Sofia Dreitser devoted herself to something, she didn’t let go. Zhenya Gelman knew how to get to a safe place when the world around him was ending. And he still had his family, with the exception of his older brother, who had been killed in the war—a large, noisy, argumentative family that took her in the way a wave takes in a body. She wanted these things, and most days that equaled out to she wanted him.

So she ordered her own pride back and waited patiently, faithfully, for his return from prison and welcomed him home with his favorite meal, lamb cutlets and “mashed potatoes in the cloud style,” so called by him because they were as airy as clouds, and all without butter. She waited until she became Sofia Gelman; until they produced Tanya Gelman; until Tanya met Edik Shtuts, such a different man from her own husband; until Tanya and Edik produced Vyacheslav Gelman, though she, Sofia, called him Slava for short; until they left the place that was soaked with the blood of her family for a place that meant nothing to her except what it would do for her grandson, for whom she had lived since the moment she had approached Zhenya Gelman at
the Spartak Dance Club in 1945 and said can you help.

When Slava abandoned Brooklyn, he bought a small notebook, intending to
keep it filled with details about his grandmother’s life. That was how he would remain close to her. The problem was that he didn’t know a great deal about Grandmother’s life. Even when she was well, she regarded her personal history as one regarded a tragic mistake. Some people can’t stop working over their tragic mistakes—Slava was this type of person; he turned over in his mind endlessly the mystifying details of his failures at
Century
—but other people prefer to live as if their tragic mistakes never took place. Slava’s grandmother was this kind of person. She wanted to know whether Slava had finished his homework; whether he had a girlfriend; whether he had enough to eat: She could make a poached carp that lasted for a week. Slava’s life seemed insignificant next to hers, and he felt hot shame in regaling her with what girl had said what to him at school, but Grandmother followed his words with such transport that her lips followed his as he spoke.

With everyone else, Grandmother was prim, unforgiving, impermeable. Even as a young man, Grandfather whined about aches in his chest, aches in his legs, aches in his head; this irritated Slava’s grandmother. She glared at her husband as if at a child, embarrassed and angry.

So Slava took advantage of their connection and, in high school, invented a ruse. He pretended that for history class, he had been assigned to extract a family story, for a pastiche on the personal histories of the class. No such thing had been assigned—Slava’s teacher, Mr. Jury, was a red-nosed tippler who gave out class-long assignments and napped in his chair—but Grandmother wouldn’t dare cost Slava a good grade. “What can I tell you, cucumber?” she said. “Tell me why you call me that,” he said. “‘Cucumber’” she said. She smiled shyly; she didn’t know; she had never thought about it. “Tell me about the war,” he pressed cautiously. She smiled again and began, “Well . . .” The sentence ended there. Her tongue moved but no words emerged. He wanted to say, Tell me because I’d like to tell my grandchildren one day. Tell me because it happened to you, and so I should know. Tell me because it will bring me closer to you, and I want to be close to you. But he was fifteen years old, and he didn’t know how to express thoughts like these. He only knew that he wanted to know. He could tell that she would tell him anything but anything, only if he could stand it please don’t make her talk about
that
. And though he grasped how important it was for him to know—even if everyone in the family had acquiesced not to trouble Grandmother about it—he couldn’t bring himself to make her. So he said to her: “Forget about the war. Tell me about how you and Grandfather fell in love.”

He wrote out the Spartak Dance Club story in his little notebook days after he decided not to go to Brooklyn again. His family had yet to understand what was happening, though his mother was already beginning to leave messages on his answering machine, first hectoring, then begging, then feigning poor health, then feigning good news, then claiming to need advice, then loudly giving up. But
Grandmother
understood why he had to disappear, he reassured himself. Even though she never called, somehow she understood, if only because she believed that everything he did was blameless and true.

But the story of how Grandmother and Grandfather fell in love was the only story that Slava had. He traced and retraced its slender collection of details, his pocket notebook as overlarge for the few facts it contained as a widower’s bed for its revised list of occupants. He could have expanded its contents, it occurred to him once, by inventing or imagining something—the house Grandmother came from, the way the few working streetlights shone over her and Grandfather’s heads on their way back to her house. Hadn’t Slava invented a ruse to make her tell the story in the first place? But all that felt shameless now that he no longer saw her. On the pages of his notebook was the truth, and it would be impaired if he invented around it. He wasn’t going to lie the way Grandfather did, the way they all had to. His mother had earned the valedictorian slot at Belarus State, but the honor was given to the number two person, a Slav, because how could you have a Jew at the top; Belarus State admitted only two Jews per thousand, and one of them was going to win valedictorian? Invited to say something at the ceremony, a silver medal around her neck, Slava’s mother had merely smiled into the microphone and said: “I want to thank the committee . . .”

Stories like these, Slava had too many of. They went around the dinner table with no difficulty. For every story that his grandmother refused to tell, Slava’s grandfather told three. He could talk until morning. The usual dinner talk when they all lived together—shopping lists, doctors’ appointments, even Slava’s doings—bored Grandfather, and he would slink off to make eyes at the television. However, if the conversation touched something from their Soviet life, his eyes would quicken and he would launch into a ceaseless description. These stories were without beginning or end, without the context that would have helped his listeners remember who was who, how things worked. Despite trying his utmost, inevitably, Slava lost the thread, feeling like a failure because he was letting gold slip away in a fast-moving river. But his inadequacy with the details left him free to observe how Grandfather told stories, like a rushing river, indeed.
On zakhlebyvalsya
. He was choking on everything he wanted to say.

E
verybody’s on
shpilkes
,” said Arianna Bock, Slava’s cubicle neighbor, the dimes of her eyes appearing above the fiberglass divider between them.

“Big day,” Slava said, trying to sound casual.

“Big day for Slava Gelman?” she said, flitting the tips of her fingers over an imaginary keyboard.

“Did you see what I wrote?” he said. “It’s in the database.”

She nodded, a flicker of disagreement passing over her face. He noticed her: pale skin, a slash of red lips, a frizz of charcoal hair. A large birthmark spanned both halves of her right eyelid. It reunited and broke again when she blinked.

“What is it?” he said.

“Nothing, it’s great,” she said.

The deception cut into him, but he didn’t pursue it. “It’s time for your walk,” he said drily. Every morning at eleven, Arianna vanished for a constitutional, as she called it. Cannons could be firing on the palace, but everything would wait until her return. He admired and resented her skillful oblivion.

She smiled, forgiving the sharpness in his voice.

“And where today?” he said.

“You don’t know until you get outside,” she said. “That’s the point. You should come.”

The thought of wandering without editorial purpose filled Slava with anxiety. Unlike Arianna, he had things to do. Slava owed laughs to “The Hoot.” Upon ascending to the editorship two years before, Beau Reasons had decided the magazine needed humor, and so Slava was assigned to scour regional newspapers for slipups, flubs, and double entendres, to which
Century
appended a wry commentary (the rejoinder, in
Century
talk). Slava would find in the
Provincetown Banner
:

Century
would add:

If Slava managed to clear through the pile of
Union-Tribune
s and
Plain Dealer
s on his desk before quitting time, he launched into the stories he himself was trying to write. There was no time for walks to . . . where? They were in Midtown, a cold needle-forest of skyscrapers, striped shirts, pencil skirts, flats, barrettes, crinkling brown sandwich bags of the sort Slava had used to cover his first American schoolbooks, bodies in perpetual sidestep, instructions barked into a cell phone . . . No, Slava didn’t want to go outside. His life had a shape, hermetically sealed: on one end the office where he spent the daylight hours, on the other the apartment where he slept, between them the long underground rod of the 6 train. No walks.

He studied the treacherous slingshot of Arianna’s clavicle. She knew all about it—in the summer, you could count on one hand the number of times she wore sleeves. Not that Slava counted. Unlike Slava, who remained in the office to work on his writing, Arianna went home at six sharp—“I need to veg” was her announcement, as if she had depleted herself mowing a field. Arianna, a fact-checker, had the eagerness of the red checking pencil anchoring the bun of her hair. He had no time for her, if that’s how it was. Besides, Slava stayed clear of anything that could turn into something. He had precious little free time as it was.

However, sometimes curiosity bested even Slava’s leonine will, and he listened to the noise she made on the other side of the divider. White, blocky teeth eviscerating the leisure end of an old-fashioned pencil. The hollow thump of a bracelet against the Lucite of which their desktops were made. A back cracking in both directions, then the knuckles. The rabbity progress of teeth down the rims of a sunflower seed. Boots jangly with some kind of spur. Hooting laughter, as if there were no one else in the room.

Sometimes, when she wasn’t at her desk, Slava would peek over. Arianna ate almost nothing but salads, occasionally a pair of hard-boiled eggs without mayonnaise. The plastic containers remained on her desk, unfinished and open, until the end of the day, when he heard the day’s purchases hitting the walls of the garbage can: coffee cup, salad container, eggshells. Occasionally, these items missed and landed on the floor, or she left them on her desk altogether. Arianna maintained the American attitude toward help: It was their job. Souvenirs from the day’s salad decorated her tabletop: a triangle of lettuce, a streaky olive, a full anchovy. After she walked out, Slava tidied up on her side.

It was thanks to Arianna that Slava had found himself assigned to observe a new feat by an
urban explorer. Beau had appeared before the Junior Staff pen—it really was a pen; the sixteen Juniors sat behind a railing like zoo rhinos—and thrown out an invitation to contribute to
Century
—
an invitation to contribute to
Century—as if he was merely adjusting ad count for the upcoming issue.

While everyone was busy being stunned—except for Peter Devicki, naturally; Peter, the only Junior to have published anything in the magazine, had his hand up before he knew what Beau was asking for—Arianna stared incandescently at Slava’s temple. He looked over. Her eyes were fixed on him like headlights. She would have raised his arm for him if she could.

“Listen,” she said now, draping her forearms on the divider. Five copper bracelets rattled against the fiberglass. Her nails were boyishly short and girlishly red. “This is tacky, but sometimes tacky’s just the thing. Imagine yourself winning this afternoon. Do something as if you got it.”

“Like what?” he said. “Champagne bath in Bean’s office?”

“Don’t make fun,” she said. “I said it was corny. What are you going to do? Get on the phone, call your parents, and tell them to buy next week’s issue. Because it’s going to have a story by you in it.”

“It’s bad luck to celebrate beforehand,” he said.

“The point is to do it when it’s impractical.”

“They think I’ve been writing for this magazine for three years,” he said. “That’s what I told them when I got hired, so they wouldn’t feel bad.”

“What would they have you do?”

Slava threw up his hands.

“All right,” she said. “I have to go.”

He was chagrined to have her give up so quickly. “How did you know I wanted to do it?” he said in a rush. “The way you looked at me when Beau came around.”

“You’d have to be deaf and mute not to know,” she said.

He watched her walk away. Despite his spying on her, it hadn’t occurred to him that she might spy in return. Arianna Bock wasn’t really a noticer. This Slava knew with a husband’s knowledge—in the last year and a half, he had spent more time within a foot of this hieroglyphic presence than within any other, a melancholy statistic. She marched around the Junior Staff pen heedless of its funereal quiet, forgot what she was told, and cast out of mind things that refused to clarify themselves with efficiency. At the Friday-afternoon Junior Staff assignment meetings, she responded to Mr. Grayson, their voluminous chief, as if they were both senior editors rather than she someone dependent on his goodwill and desire to employ her. Once he had asked her if she was interested in fact-checking a story, and she’d said: Are you really asking? Everyone laughed. Even Mr. Grayson.

He looked down at his desk phone. They were all still there, at Grandfather’s. Only Slava had left. The events of the previous day, momentarily sidelined by Arianna, refilled his mind. You had to give her that: She filled the frame of your thinking.