Boris Fishman - A Replacement Life

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.

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.