A Replacement Life (27 page)

Lazar wanted Slava to fall in love with his granddaughter, so Slava gave him
a love story. The rest he invented, following one detail until it gave him the next. He had started far more carefully with the letters—lists of details, outlines, narrative arcs. He had always known what piece of information would come next. However, the stories came out better if he didn’t know everything in advance. In real life, one thing might have happened, but in the letter? It might have, it might not. Was Weidt’s plan a trick to root out ghetto inmates who were causing problems for the administration? Would he slip out of his ropes in the middle of the night, club to death the partisan guarding him, and spirit off Ilse? Was he first a devoted Nazi or a Nazi who had fallen in love? You had to write it down to find out.

In their claim letters, the estranged elders of Midwood, né Minsk, spent time together in a way they refused to in real life. Grandmother and Grandfather fell in love in Lazar’s story; someone else got Lazar’s poor hearing. However, other things were lost, blurred, made false. Mother, Father, and Zeyde killed when the ghetto was liquidated: That is what had happened to Grandmother’s family, he was certain of that, even if the fact crowned Lazar’s story. But was it her father who was a ferrier? And Grandfather hadn’t demanded a date in exchange for helping Grandmother free herself of the leering captain, had he? Why had Slava written it differently, then? That was what the story had asked. The price was, by the end, Slava didn’t remember what about it was true and what was invented.

He was startled by the ring of the phone. The last time it had rung this late, it had been to announce Grandmother’s last trip to Maimonides. It rang several times before he picked up.

“Mr. Gelmonn?” arrived nasally from the other end. “I hef hea—Vyacheslav Gelman? Slava Gelman? Sam Gelman?”

“Who?” Slava said. No one used his full name. Sam Gelman? He had used that name for a year in junior high school.

“Vee-ya-chess-love Gelman,” the nose continued to prod. “Terrific and unusual name. Is the number correct?”

“No, it’s me,” Slava said. He tried to chase the fatigue from his eyes. “Who’s calling?”

“My name is Otto Barber. From the Conference on Material Claims Against Germany.”

Slava’s blood froze.

“Mr. Gelman?”

“Yes?”

“Your assistance would be most valuable.”

“I don’t understand,” Slava said.

“Mr. Gelman, it has been to us a report,” Otto Barber went on conspiratorially. “Regarding some of the letters that have arrived for the restitution. So I am hoping to speak with you.”

Slava walked over to his futon and made himself lie down, as if to enforce casualness. “I don’t understand,” he repeated.

“I will explain all, naturally,” Otto Barber said.

“How did you reach me?” Slava said, stalling. He wasn’t going to write any more! He was the smoker who quits the day before he finds out he has cancer.

“Ze White Pages? Ze Yellow Pages? It is a listed number, excuse me.”

Was it? “You’re calling very late,” Slava said, then wondered if he was giving himself away, too defensive. He had never thought about the phone. On the street, he turned around every time he was in Brooklyn. Foolishness—what, they were going to swoop down on him with sirens? It’s never what you think.

“That is absolutely without manners, I agree,” Otto said. “You have to please forgive me. I am like the rodent in the wheel here—meeting number one, meeting number two . . . We have meetings to plan meetings. It is quite unbelievable, actually: It is ten
P.M.,
and have I been eating my dinner? No!” He giggled.

Slava didn’t answer.

“Mr. Gelman, the letters are false!” Otto barreled on. “Can you believe this? Do you know anything about it, please?”

“Why would I know anything about it?” Slava insisted.

“Shame!” Otto bellowed, and giggled again. “I had my fingers crossed, I am telling you! Mr. Gelman, I would like to meet with you to discuss this subject. What you can tell us can be very valuable.”

“What I can tell you?” Slava said.

“I would not dream of requesting you to come visit us at the Conference here—though it’s a nice building and the coffee is free, yes! But maybe you and I drink something stronger together? If so, I’m buying! You are doing me the favor, Mr. Gelman, so I can come to you.”

“I don’t know what I can tell you,” Slava repeated. “I had nothing to do with it.”

“To do with it?” Otto shouted. “Oh my goodness, what laughter. You are a joker like me, Mr. Gelman. Together, we will get along. No, Mr. Gelman—
to do with it
? What,
you
wrote the false ones? Ha-ha-ha. No, Mr. Gelman, I want your . . . consulting. You are a complete American. You live on the Upper East Side, you work at
Century
magazine—though I find it quite boring, excuse me, our secret!—and yet you can understand the Russian person’s thinking. Why does someone do this,
how
does someone do this. Because I am not trained for this kind of—sleuthing, I learned this word recently. I am, quite frankly—how do you say it—out of my level.”

Slava’s mind raced. If he turned Otto down, that would only increase suspicion. But why? Slava had every right to wish not to get involved. He had decided to separate from his neighborhood, so this was exactly the kind of entanglement he meant to stay away from. However, Otto knew a frightening number of things about him—how? No, Slava had to agree to a meeting. Under the guise of giving advice, he could ferret out what the German knew. Also, he needed to burn every piece of hard-copy evidence, retrieve the faxes from Grandfather’s house, delete the files from his computer . . .

It had finally happened. Even as, all these weeks, he simultaneously dreaded and brushed away the possibility—why did he have to be caught? he didn’t—Slava didn’t feel surprise at the news on the other end of the line. It was relief of a kind: It had finally happened, the worst was in, and now he could get down to dealing with it. He had to start by meeting Otto. Certainly, he wasn’t going to allow Otto to visit him at home; no, he wasn’t as easy as that. But it would seem strange if Slava volunteered to go to the Conference—an overaccommodation. Fine, they would meet in a bar. Slava would nurse a beer and Otto would keep drinking until he started to become careless with his words. That was the way.

“When do you want to meet?” Slava said. “I can meet tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow?” Otto said. “Thanks God it’s Friday, am I right? No, take the weekend, Mr. Gelman. We are not solving a murder here, ha-ha. This can keep—is that the expression? Is Monday available for you? Monday evening. I am finishing here at six
P.M.
, even if they try to keep me with chains. That’s the finishing hour at
Century
, isn’t it?”

How did he
know
these things? Slava cursed himself for being too eager. “Seven?” he said weakly. It would be light out still, that felt safer somehow. Slava gave Otto the name of a bar in the neighborhood. If the man wanted advice so much, yes, he could come to Slava. The pub
was neither a dive nor fashionable; it was invisible in the way Slava wanted.

“That is so convenient,” Otto exclaimed. “I live in the neighborhood! The Yorkville area has a fantastic German history. I am almost like home!” He mentioned a bakery that prepared strudel and a butcher’s that had been selling wurst since the 1920s. “I would not say, if we agree to be honest, the Upper East Side is a neighborhood for a thinking person. It is the Florida of New York, no? The recent graduates of the colleges, they are drinking themselves to blindness and everyone else is slowly waiting to die, even if they are forty years old! If the small German connection was not present, I would not live there.”

Slava was still processing the news that he and Otto lived in the same neighborhood. Had Otto seen him on the street? Had they eaten at the same restaurant? Had Otto watched him from across a bar? Slava had never thought to look around him in Manhattan, only Brooklyn.
They were neighbors.

“Akh, Mr. Gelman, you really have to forgive me. It’s ten o’clock and I am chewing your ear with this nonsense. We will talk about everything—about war, and maybe also a little bit about writing—when we meet. I look forward to it! Do you forgive me for calling so late?”

He really wanted an answer. Slava heard himself forgiving the German. The German erupted into a new series of exclamations. Only then did he bid Slava goodbye.

S
lava had spent most of the night excavating the sheets on his side of the bed, grateful for the dead way in which Arianna slept. At last, he rose, the hour too early for light even in summer, and sat at her silver-leafed kitchen table, his hands clasped—a guilty person. He tried to reason through his options, but even though, restless in bed, he could think of nothing but sitting across from Otto, their conversation writing itself in his mind like a false letter, now, at the table, his head filled with a stubborn blankness. He chuckled sullenly. And what would Grandmother say about this turn? Was she an accomplice in Grandfather’s subterfuges, and if so, an eager one or ashamed? Slava couldn’t imagine Grandmother ashamed, even of sin. And yet, she was an upright person. So upright he couldn’t imagine her loving Grandfather more than her own uprightness. But she was upright only toward loved ones. Slava mashed his hands together in agony, his eyes burning with a fatigue that made clear thinking impossible. He had been writing letters about his grandmother for weeks, but in moments like this, he felt as if he knew her barely at all, like a territory that grew larger the more of it you walked. It was the same with Arianna, he noted bitterly. Worse: Grandmother only became more unknown; Arianna became more unfamiliar.

He checked the kitchen window for light, but you could see little there, as it overlooked one of those poetic brick walls on which so many New York windows gaze. The clock said a quarter after five. Slava stole back into the bedroom and lifted his cell phone from the pocket of his jeans. Arianna remained in oblivion, but the cat opened a knowing gray eye. Slava froze in
place, then ridiculed himself—his guilt was such that he was ready to answer to an animal. Advertising his indifference to the bulk of black fur, he strode out of the room.

He swallowed heavily as the telephone rang. She would be up, she had to be at the pharmacy at half past six, but no one dialed for leisure at five
A.M.
, and indeed, when his mother snatched up the phone, her voice was frantic with fear. Now only one old Gelman remained about whom bad news could arrive at this unholy hour—why did old people die only in the night?—and though she had checked in with Grandfather in the evening (he had complained about the springs in his mattress, would these be his last words to her? how hopeless and absurd), her son was now in contact with the old neighborhood more than she was. He might know first.

“Everything’s fine, it’s fine,” he reassured her.

“What is it?” she said, her voice giving up fear but not puzzlement. No one was dead, but her son would not call just to call. She’d had to enter intimate terms with this new understanding in her life, like an illness.

Dear Mother: Was your mother a liar, a cheat? Did she look the other way while Grandfather fenced cars, smuggled gold, sold minks on the black market? Or was she his conspirator, his handler, his Bonnie? Did her uprightness extend only to the people she loved? What would she tell me to do now?

Instead, he said: “Summer’s ending.”

“Slava?” she said. “What is it?”

“Do you remember Mariela?” he said.

“The Spanish girl?” she said. Slava and Mariela had dated for a year and a half during college and had given it up—unusual wisdom, such young people—when they began to ask more of it than it could give. But for several months, they had been inseparable, the daughter of Colombian Catholics and the son of Soviet Jews making out in an empty room at the Met.

“I told Grandmother about her,” he said. “She was sick already.”

“Mariela? Have you seen her?”

“Do you know what Grandmother said?” he said. “She listened carefully. Then she said: ‘Does she know how to cook?’”

His mother snorted.

“I said no. You remember Mariela—she didn’t own a pot for macaroni. Grandmother thought about it, and then she said: ‘What a putz.’”

His mother laughed, her voice less cautious. “Have you been going to the grave?” Slava said.

“Every weekend,” she said.

“Maybe you should take some time from the pharmacy,” he said.

“No, no,” she said. “This way, my mind is busy. Working at the pharmacy, you get the impression that there are no healthy people in the world. The normal condition is not health but
illness. It makes you feel better in a way—I used to ask God why only she became ill—but then you feel guilty about it. And I still ask God, only a different question: If so many are ill, why did she have to die? And I feel terrible, like a hideous person. But I miss my mother.”

“As I miss her,” he said.

“You can’t sleep,” she said.

“I can’t sleep,” he confirmed. “Would she have gone along? With what I’m doing?”

“She loved you so much,” she said.

“But what I’m asking.”

“She loved all of us. There was nothing you could do that she wouldn’t go along with.”

“This is just a nice thought. When she found me with Lusty Lena, she got me by the ears, I can still feel it.”

“I don’t know what you want me to say, son—we were having a nice conversation.”

He apologized and gave in to silence. “It’s getting light,” he said at last. “Is it getting light by you?”

“Yes,” she said. “You know the heat makes me crazy, but I think about fall, and I start crying. It’s a crime for a person to die in the spring because everything is just beginning, and it’s a crime for a person to die in the fall because everything is ending as it is, and a person can’t die in the summer because it’s the summer. A person should die in the winter. Only in the winter. I hope I die in the winter.”