Boris Fishman - A Replacement Life

“Is that why you stood up for me?” he said.

“Of course not,” she said. “Most of the Jews in America — that’s where we come from. I grew up listening to my grandmother’s stories. And you form a certain image. And then you read something like what you wrote, and it’s nothing at all like what you thought.”

“So that was why.”

“No,” she groaned. “You’re exhausting. Yes, in part, but the number one reason is it was good, really good. You brought it alive. Just that it isn’t the kind of piece that runs in Century . It wasn’t right for Beau — but that means everything?”

He nodded. All of a sudden, he felt very tired. He felt it in his shoulders, a long, draining weight. He imagined himself taking a seat on the pavement and staying there for a long time. “Why didn’t we go to the poetry reading?” he said.

“Those things are boring. I go only to see if people are better. If they’re bad, I’m the most satisfied person in the room. Satisfied, satisfied, satisfied.” She tapped out the words on his chest.

“You say out loud things other people think,” he said.

“I am Human 2.0,” she said. They laughed, then fell silent.

They watched each other without comment, too long for it to mean anything other than what it meant. He lowered his lips toward hers, his hand on her cheek. They kissed slowly, the human traffic of First Avenue taking them into its indifferent arms, the city’s special combination of curiosity and resentment. He tingled with a strange sensation; he was unconcerned with the walkers around him in return, but amiably so.

When he pulled back, he said, “Come on. I want to hear it.”

“Jesus!” she said. “Fine.” She took his arm and pushed him around the corner. The gleam and noise of the avenue receded. Slava felt the building’s wall at his back, the bricks still warm from the day. She was shorter only by an inch or two; if she wore heels, she would be taller. She was sideways to him, holding his arm with her palm. “It’s a poem about weather,” she said in exasperation.

“The weather,” he repeated.

“Weather, weather,” she said. “The thing people talk about when they have nothing to say.”

“The satin skies, that sort of thing.”

“Slava!” she said. “In the dictionary, next to asshole — you.” She slammed a fist into his chest.

“Sorry,” he agreed.

“You’ve got me wound up, now I’m hot to say the poem.”

“Say it,” he said.

Her eyes settled at his neck. He tried to lift her chin, but she swatted his arm away. She spoke in such a rushed, low monotone that he had to make her stop and start over. “Just let me finish,” she said.

“No,” he said, making her look up at him. “Please. Slowly.” So she started over. She spoke clearly this time, and he listened intently, but he could hardly focus on the words.

The bar they were heading to, Straight Shooters, arrived too soon. Here, too, Arianna knew the bartender. They really were straight shooters on the alcohol issue, or perhaps it was Arianna’s acquaintance that secured them such brimming glasses. The music was mellower, Southern if he had to guess, and there was a more committed row of solitary drinkers at the bar. She made him twirl her before they sat down. His head heavy with drink, he tried, in the noise, to distinguish why he was here — to be with her or merely without himself? Slava was not much of a drinker, but gazing at the solo patrons seated down the length of the bar, locked away from each other and the world by the crisp pints in their hands, he sensed clearly the appeal of their American pastime. His legs helixed with Arianna’s at two bar stools.

“You haven’t told me a thing,” she said. “I told you about my hips, for God’s sake.”

“My grandmother died yesterday,” he blurted out.

“Shit,” she said as if she had done something wrong. “Are you serious? Are you all right? Don’t answer that. I don’t know why people ask that.”

“It was a long time coming,” he reassured her.

“I’m sorry.” She took his hands.

He shook his head to say it was fine.

“Were you close?”

“Yes. No. It’s hard to answer.” His head weighed two tons. He freed a hand and tried to get the bartender’s attention.

She slid off her stool and returned a minute later with two shot glasses.

“You don’t clink,” he said.

She nodded and drank in one gulp. He sipped his. “Tell me something about her,” she said.

Slava gazed past Arianna’s shoulder. The bar drinkers were undermining their noble solitude by staring into the blue screens of cell phones.

“You don’t have to,” she added.

His mouth felt dry. “My grandfather,” he said, “you have to give him credit. At eighty, the wheels are still turning.” He finished the drink, a brown burn.

She awaited more. “She’s a survivor,” he said. He tipped his forehead to make his meaning clear — Holocaust survivor — but Arianna did not require the clarification. “Only she and her sister,” he went on. “The rest of the family — gone. It takes sixty years for her to get restitution. How do they calculate it? Five thousand for a mother, four for a father, three for a grandparent? What if you were raised by the grandparents? What if the grandparents are the parents? You have to agree: It’s tricky.”

“Don’t say things like that.”

He studied her. Did questions like this cease to exist because you didn’t bring them up? He took her hand in his. To restrain his irritation? Because it would dispose her toward him? Her fingers felt smooth and dry. She allowed them to be clasped. “The point is,” he said, “the restitution letter came just days before she died.” He opened his hands. “Isn’t.”

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“My grandfather says, ‘Send it in anyway. Write it about me.’ But he was evacuated.”

“You can’t do that,” she said.

“Can’t I?” he said. “Did you know that they fertilized crops with human ash? After the war, the tomatoes were the size of an infant’s head.” He gave the words the same inflection that his grandfather did, only in English. They had a new but not unfamiliar sound on his tongue. He knew how to say them. She looked away.

“Can you blame him?” he went on. “You think he had plans to leave Minsk in 1941? No, he ran from the Germans. Then he came back and was a Jew under the Soviets for forty-five years, which is to say a lower life-form. Then America. Here you’re not a Jew anymore. Here you’re an immigrant. Go back where you came from, Commie . You don’t think he’s due?” The rehearsal of Grandfather’s arguments came with wondrous facility to Slava. He rested his hand on his forehead contemplatively, to see how it felt.

“I want to tell you a story,” Arianna said carefully. “There was a Soviet family that was settled near us. We’d sponsored them, actually. I had been pen pals with the son before they were released — you know the story. And so Mother Bock says, ‘Harry, get them memberships in the synagogue.’ And my father, he’s not as quick as my mother, but then he will surprise you. And so he says: ‘I don’t think that’s for them, Sandy.’ Meaning, they’re not religious. And Sandra says, ‘How will they ever become religious unless people like us—’ and so on and so forth. Harry, as always, in the end, he does what Sandra says, and he gets them synagogue memberships. One hundred fifty a person, times three, and this was fifteen years ago. Also, the synagogue has limited seats, he had to talk to the registrar, get special permission. But we don’t see them — the Rubins, they were called. Instead, we see another family, also three — Americans. They get to chatting with my parents, it’s Friday-night services, everyone has a couple of shots. And they tell them this Russian family sold them the memberships. Sandra — you should have seen her face. After all the lifts, that face doesn’t really telegraph emotion, but at that moment she could have been in the opera. She kept her mouth shut only because she was mortified. Harry just chuckled to himself. She wanted to call the police! And he said, ‘Just let them be. Think about what they’ve been through. Give it thirty years, then they’ll ask for it.’”