Boris Fishman - A Replacement Life

“Oh, that’s all right. Just a mix-up. You know, he worries for no reason, that man. I’ll tell him to cool it.”

She laughed again. “All right. If only all grandsons were this concerned! Come visit us sometime with Grandpa, okay?”

“I am like the Master here,” Israel said with a belch, pointing to the living room window, which cleared the pavement by a dozen inches. A pair of feet clicked past, adding to the thin mist of dust on the glass. “ Master and Margarita . You’ve read it?”

Slava nodded. “In class.”

“I’m rereading Gogol,” Israel said. “‘Whither art thou soaring, Russia?’ He knew where they were soaring. Right into the shit bucket.” Israel turned back toward the window. “You can tell people’s moods by the way they walk,” he observed. They watched a lame leg make its dragging passage. “His mood is, ‘I want my old leg back,’” Israel said, and broke into hoarse laughter. He coughed brutally into his fist, the bristle of his eyebrows trembling and leaping. “When you have only a little thread,” he announced grandly after recovering, “you have to know how to make a whole blanket from it.” He placed his hands on his hips, as if about to start calisthenics. “As I said, I do a little writing, too.” He coughed again. “My throat is a desert, I’m sorry. Sit, sit, don’t stand like an inspector.” He motioned to the sofa, its suede haunches cinched by plastic gold bands. “One writer to another, I want to say: I admire the way you work.”

“Meaning?” Slava said, falling into the sofa.

“You don’t need me to invent the story,” he said. “For the claim form, I mean. But here you are. You wanted to sniff around.” Israel wiggled his nose. “ Texture , you wanted.”

“Where’s your family, Israel Arkadievich?” Slava said.

“You can call me Israel,” he said. “We are in America now, you can be informal. Back home, you can save someone from drowning and you won’t get a thank-you, but they’ll always call you Israel Arkadievich. Here, it’s that hai-hava-yoo all the time, but they won’t save you if you’re drowning. Am I correct?”

“I guess you are,” Slava said, thinking about it.

“My wife is dead eighteen months,” he said. “May the earth be like down for her. I’m sure you can tell.” His gnarly fingers swept the room. “‘The frying pan is not sizzling and the kettle is not whistling,’ as we used to say.”

“I’m sorry,” Slava said. “I didn’t know.”

“My son…” He indicated the window sadly, as if the son were standing outside it. “A couple of years after we came, Yuri got mixed up with those blackhats. They organized the whole world for him over at that synagogue. He stopped eating in our kitchen, put on that hat. My wife was still alive to see it, I regret that she was. And then… poof —he left. He’s in Israel now.” Israel stuck out his tongue. “They have these curls down to their shoulders like two swinging pricks, excuse me. How do they get those things to curl like that? Curling iron? Vain bastards.” He nearly spat, then remembered it was his living room. “Look.” He rummaged in a tin eating bowl on the bookshelf until he held a worn-out square.

Slava unfolded the photograph with his fingertips, the paper as frayed as a dry leaf. On the back, in a smudged violet cursive, it said: “Yuri — too late.” From the front smiled a young, round face wispy with a month’s beard, the grin toothy and guileless. The teeth had not enjoyed the correction of braces. Already their owner was wearing the costume of the pious. A black suit jacket, specks of dandruff visible despite the mediocre quality of the photo, over a white shirt with a drooping collar, underneath it a white tee with tumbleweeds of chest hair rising above the neckline. Behind him were ponderous burgundy drapes that could have belonged only to a Russian banquet hall in Israel’s neighborhood.

“Why did you rename yourself?” Slava said.

“It’s not Israel’s fault,” he said. “There aren’t enough of these blackhats over here? Besides, I changed it before any of this started, right when we came. I wanted to show my support. Who’s Iosif? Iosif was me in the USSR. That person is finished.”

“It’s nice to meet someone who knew my grandfather when he was young,” Slava said.

“Now there’s a story,” Israel said.

“He doesn’t like to talk about it.”

“That’s a load. He would tell a horse how to trot.”

“Then I don’t believe what he says,” Slava said.

Israel smirked. “Why would you believe what I say?”

“If you lie, I won’t write the application for you.”

He laughed. “Very good! You are becoming clever. It runs in your family.”

“Meaning what?”

“I meant no offense,” Israel said.

“But meaning what.”

“Meaning what.” Israel leaned forward. “Do you know how your grandfather got that home nurse of his?” He clapped once per name: “Marina. Berta. Olga. They change all the time.

“Your grandmother — may the earth be like down for her — had twelve hours of nurse care a day from the city. That’s a lot, by the way. You’ve got these American grandmothers wandering around, bags of bones, they paid in to the tax base for fifty years, and they don’t have any help. It breaks your heart to see these people. I feel like a pole jumper next to them.

“Anyway, your grandfather decides twelve a day’s not enough. He wants your grandmother to have someone around the clock. So he gives the twelve-hour nurse some money and tells her to call the agency to ask for an extension on the hours. ‘The husband’s gone bad from helping take care of the wife,’ she says. ‘They need someone full-time.’

“So the assessor comes from the city. All this is from your grandfather’s lips, by the way, because he’s a braggart. The assessor comes and your grandfather is sitting there like a vegetable. Drooling, head keeled over like it’s not connected to the rest of him. The assessor starts calling to him—‘Yevgeny, Yevgeny’—so your grandfather starts grunting and gnashing his teeth. He acted out the whole thing in front of me at Korolenko’s office. Minus the bowel-loosening. Your grandfather should have moved to Hollywood.”

“And they got twenty-four hours,” Slava said. “Berta.”

“You know who gets twenty-four hours, typically?” Israel said. “Quadriplegics, war veterans, and psychotics. But he wanted it for your grandmother, and he got it. Your grandfather gets things.”

“He got me,” Slava said. Through the little window, the light was beginning to steal out of the sky.

“You are too smart for that,” Israel said.

“Don’t be sure,” Slava said.

“I’ve known him sixty years,” Israel said. “‘A child of other people’s gardens,’ they called him. He got what needed to be got. The salami, the caviar, the cognac, the minks. Nobody had access to those things but Party people with special privileges. Even I can’t tell you how he — a barber — got what he got. Do you know how wealthy your family was at home? In secret, but still. Not everyone had the stomach for it. How many people did he keep in Climat perfume, bananas, free trips to Crimea, so their mouths would stay closed about what he got for himself, your grandmother, your mama, you? I saw him on the street one time. It was hotter than a furnace outside, and he’s wearing an overcoat. It looked like he had a piglet in there. I said, ‘Zhenya, what’s with the coat?’”

“He had something stuffed in there,” Slava said.

“Fifteen sticks of salami taped to the insides!” Israel sniggered. “Like rocket launchers! That salami was so fresh it could talk. You understand if you got stopped with fifteen sticks of salami? That’s ‘intent to sell,’ ‘private enterprise,’ prison.