A Replacement Life (2 page)

It gave without knocking. Usually, Grandfather bolted all three locks—in this part of Brooklyn, eyes still roamed with Soviet heights of desire. But it was a day of mourning. Like Tolstoy’s villagers putting on the lights outside after dinner, he was asking for company.

Inside, a sweet glaze hung in the air, dishes clattering in the kitchen. Slava slipped off his shoes and tiptoed the length of the hallway until he could see into the living room. Grandfather was on the beige sofa, the ash-colored down of his hair in his hands. On the street, women noticed Grandfather—Italian cashmere, his hands and forearms needled with sea-colored tattoos—before they noticed the grandson holding his arm. Now the old man was in gym trousers and undershirt, looking like an old man. His toenails were testing the air, as if to make sure the world was still there.

The sofa hissed as Slava lowered himself next to Grandfather. Yevgeny Gelman removed his hands from his face and stared at his grandson as if he were unknown and it was an affront to encounter another person without the woman alongside whom he had spent half a century. Slava was the notice that a million diabolical dislocations awaited.

“Gone, your grandmother,” Grandfather whimpered, and rolled his head into the starch of Slava’s shirt. He honked out a sob, then sprang back. “It’s a nice suit,” he said.

“Mom call?” Slava said. The Russian words sounded as if said by another: nasal, arch, ungrammatical. He had spoken Russian last when he had spoken last to his mother, a month before, though he continued to swear in Russian and he continued to marvel in Russian.
Ukh ty
.
Suka
.
Booltykh
. These had no improvement in English.

Grandfather searched Slava’s face for adequate grasp of his heartache. “Mama’s at Grusheff’s,” he said. “She said to call people and tell them. The Schneyersons are coming. Benya Zeltzer said he’ll try to get free. He owns three food stores.”

“Is anyone helping her?” Slava said.

“I don’t know. That rabbi, Zilberman?”

“You know Zilberman isn’t a rabbi,” Slava said.

Grandfather shrugged. Certain questions he did not ask.

Zilberman wasn’t a rabbi. As Kuvshitz wasn’t a rabbi, nor Gryanik. They loitered in the hospital waiting rooms, Soviet immigrants who had learned a little Hebrew and were conveniently present to ennoble a passing like Grandmother’s with Torah-compliant burial guidance for a small fee. And why not? Their brothers and cousins hauled furniture, drove ambulettes starting at sunrise, skim-coated walls until their fingers shredded and bled—so who
was smart.

And were these men not delivering exactly what their customers wanted? Were they not, simply, in the American way, addressing a demand of the market? Their compatriots had spent too many years under Soviet atheism to observe Jewish ritual now that they were free to do so, but they wanted a taste, a holy sprinkling, a
forshpeis
. Enter Zilberman et al., temporarily transformed into Moshe, Chaim, Mordechai. These artists of gray zones picked from the religious guidance on Jewish burials selectively. Immediate burial, as per Jewish law—certainly. As for a plain pine coffin, rimmed by no flowers—was that really right? The deceased may not have been a millionaire or an international personage, but he or she had been an anchor of families, a sufferer of world wars, a bearer of plain wisdom. This person deserved greater than #2 pine. Grusheff Funeral Home—Valery Grushev thought the two f’s made his name sound as if his ancestors had come with the aristocracy that had fled the Bolsheviks via France in 1917—had coffins from Belarusian birch, California redwood, even Lebanese cedar. Didn’t those who’d known the deceased deserve an opportunity to say goodbye one last time at a service? From each milestone of grief, Moshe and Chaim collected percentages.

“I’ll help call if you’d like,” Slava said to Grandfather.

“I’m almost finished,” Grandfather said. “Not that many people to call, Slava.”

In the kitchen, a pot crashed into another, interrupting the rush of the sink water. A woman cursed herself for clumsiness. Grandfather lifted his head, his eyes alert once again. “Come,” he said, his hand on Slava’s forearm. “Things change, you don’t come for so long.” Rising, he leaned on Slava’s arm with more weight than he needed.

They filled the kitchen doorway arm in arm, like a pair of lovers. The blue rims of Grandfather’s eyes welled with tears. “Berta,” he said hoarsely. “My grandson.” Death or no death, Grandfather could ingratiate himself with his new home attendant by formally introducing his grandson.

Like a Soviet high-rise, each floor of Berta was stuffed beyond capacity. Silver polish gleamed from her toes, wedged into platforms that she was using as house slippers; flower-print capri tights encased in a death grip the meat-rack haunch of her legs. Slava felt a treacherous lurch in his groin. She hadn’t heard Grandfather.

“Berta!” Grandfather barked. His arm tensed and he rapped the wall with his knuckles. Berta spun around. Underneath its creases and the worried, close set of the eyes, her face had preserved its young, unblemished beauty. A buttery gleam rose from the skin.

“The boy!” she shrieked. Holding up her long yellow dish gloves as if placating a mugger, she waddled toward Slava and enclosed him in the flab of her arms. Berta also had to make a demonstration before Grandfather. One phone call from him to the assignments coordinator at the home-nurse agency, who received from Grandfather a monthly gift of chocolates and perfume, and Berta would be reassigned to a paraplegic who needed his ass wiped and his oatmeal
spoon-fed. Slav Berta, whose people had used to terrorize Jews like Grandfather! This—more than the profusion of meat in American supermarkets, the open availability of rare technology, even the cavalierness with which Americans spoke of their president—was the mysterious grandeur of the country that had taken in the Gelmans of Minsk. It had the power to turn tormentors into kitchen help.

Berta held Slava like the flaps of a coat in winter, a hard-on developing inside his slacks. On the stovetop, a pan sizzled with butter and onions. That was the sweetness in the air. The after-funeral table would stagger with food. The guests had to see: This house did not lack for provisions.

As Slava embraced in Grandmother’s kitchen a woman he’d never met with an intimacy neither of them felt, the feeling he had begun to remember for Grandmother receded, like someone gently tiptoeing out of the wrong room. At the funeral service, he would be accused of indifference while Mother and Grandfather clutched each other and wailed. The guests had to see.

It had taken two years of failing to get published by
Century
magazine to
piece together the facts. Our great realizations are slow dishes, but once they’re ready, they announce themselves as suddenly as an oven timer. Grandfather had helped. Slava was visiting one rainy evening. Dinner had been finished, the dishes had been cleared by the home nurse, the conversation had dwindled. Grandmother was resting. Grandfather sat sideways in one of the dining room chairs, his palm on his forehead. Slava watched him from the folds of a love seat. His mind drifted to the next day’s chores, to the story idea on deck.

Grandfather opened his palm as if making a point to someone else in the room, and said, “What, is it too late for him to become a businessman? It’s not too late. Not late at all.” He flicked his wrist. Not late at all.

To be around Grandfather, Grandfather’s neighbors, the whole accursed neighborhood of Russians, Belarusians, Ukrainians, Moldovans, Georgians, and Uzbeks—Slava should do it if he wanted to write for a Russian newspaper, of which there were many now in the neighborhood. If he wanted to live among those who said “we don’t go to America,” except for the DMV and
Brodvei
. If he wanted to shop at marts that sold birch-leafed switches to whip yourself in the steam bath and rare Turkish shampoos that reversed baldness, but not
Century
. If he wanted to have his arm gently broken by an ex-paratrooper so he could claim it happened on ice outside Key Food and get disability. If he wanted to go out with Sveta Beyn, practitioner of high finance, who had just bought a nine-hundred-square-foot apartment, with balcony.
Bought
. (In truth, it had been bought by her parents, who took the liberty of decorating as well—lacquer, rococo, pictures of
Mama and Papa.)

But if Slava wished to become an American, to strip from his writing the pollution that refilled it every time he returned to the swamp broth of Soviet Brooklyn, if Slava Gelman—immigrant, baby barbarian, the forking road spread-eagled before him—wished to write for
Century
, he would have to get away. Dialyze himself, like Grandmother’s kidneys.

He stopped visiting, stopped calling, left someone else to pass the nights by Grandmother’s gurney as the machines cleaned her liver. It wasn’t like she could tell, most of the time. In his Manhattan exile, which failed to supply the publication he had expected immediately, Slava would think about her. With his fork over a plate of kasha; staring at the river that separated Manhattan from Queens; as he drifted to sleep.

This was the price of weathering the divide between
there
and
here
, he told himself. The facts were old, tiresome, well known: This immigrant changed his
name
on the way to success in America. This one abandoned his
religion
. And this one temporarily parted from his family, big crisis. Slava wasn’t leaving to study the human condition from a shack in the woods. He was going to
Century
—legendary, secretive
Century
, older than
The New Yorker
and, despite a recent decline, forever a paragon. No, Slava wasn’t being paid what Igor Kraz was paid for proctology, but he wasn’t palming shit-slathered tubes all day long, either.
Century
had published the first report from Budapest in 1956. It had been the first to take the abstract expressionists seriously. It had nailed Ivan Boesky and saved Van Cortlandt Park. This had meant nothing to any Gelman—all right. (It was the Honda of American magazines, he had tried to explain, the Versace, the Sony.) But educated, discerning people the whole country over—three million of them, the last count had come down from Subscriptions—regarded
Century
as Slava’s mother regarded the English queen: with awe, piety, and savage curiosity. Slava wasn’t writing there, but the Gelmans didn’t need to know that; they never bought the magazine anyway. On the sly, Slava would become a writer for
Century
—success was success, was it not, even if you subbed literature for proctology; he had hardly planned it this way—and then they would see. There was cost, but there would be reward.

Two days before his grandmother died, a stroke of dumb luck—it wasn’t dumb luck, it was Arianna Bock in the next cubicle sprinkling her fairy dust—had assigned him an article for
Century
after he had spent three years uselessly trying to achieve same on his own. He had spent Grandmother’s last day on earth watching an “urban explorer” climb up the Ulysses S. Grant tomb in Morningside Heights. It was a sodden gimmick—everyone in this impossible city had their thing, and this was this man’s—but Slava had teased from the moment a grand essay about politics, continents, love. It was why he had awakened so poorly on Sunday—he had been writing it most of Saturday night while she—knowingly? unknowingly?—marked her last hours. There were no guarantees, but a byline in
Century
? Only a byline in
The New Yorker
meant as much. Entire book contracts were given out on the basis of a byline in
Century
. It was finally happening. Only he hadn’t made it in time.

Grusheff Funeral Home occupied half a block of Ocean Parkway, the Grusheff
name covering the two outfacing sides of the building. The wide avenue slumbered in the noonday heat, the few passing cars moving without any real desire. The poles of the covered entry were gilded, and the oval windows were frosted with mermaids.

Inside, the hallway to the viewing area, carpeted in a disco mix of abstract zigzags and dashes, was lined with human-height flora, birds of paradise and hot-pink anemones sutured into vertical displays that gave the room the feel of a science fair. Valery Grusheff, cuff links and a pocket square, shuttled among the gathering mourners.

These looked made up for a scene ten years later—dumplings swam under their eyes and tires circled their waists. Grandfather, looking deranged but credibly in grief in an overcoat despite the stifling weather, stood off in the corner cursing them under his breath. In the Soviet Union—where his officially paltry position as a barber at the main train terminal actually left him at the welcome gate of all the commerce that streamed into Minsk on the overnight trains from Moscow, Kishinev, and Yerevan—he had obtained for these people watermelons, cognac, wall units, visas. When the need arose, they had found his phone number easily. But democratic America had empowered them to secure their own watermelons and doctors’ appointments. Now he always had to call such-and-such person first, only to be invited for leftovers the day after a party to which he had
not
been invited. He was not counting, but where was their gratitude? They would never see
his
ass in their chairs again.

The individuals in question greeted Slava’s mother with the exaggerated intimacy of people who had not seen her in years.

“She is in the skies.”—“Be strong for your father.”—“It’s easier for her now.”—“Be strong for your son.”

On a metal folding chair in a corner, Slava’s father pulled at the collar of his shirt, looking as unclaimed as a child in front of a school at dusk. He was present but unnoticeable, his favorite setting. He hadn’t even objected when Slava had been given the last name of Grandfather’s line instead of his own.

“Yevgeny Isakovich,” a man called out to Grandfather. The summoned looked up and nodded ponderously, grateful to be pulled away from the stream of condolences. His eyes went searching the room. Somehow, Slava knew they were searching for him. When they found him, Grandfather tweaked his eyebrows. As Slava approached, Grandfather extended his arm, and Slava took it.