Boris Fishman - A Replacement Life

“Dove, get our guest a glass of cognac, would you?” Leonard bleated.

“I’ll take care of it,” Vera whispered to Galochka, and moved to open one of the bottles.

“So what kind of writer are you?” Leonard turned back to Slava. “I read a lot. Unlike the rest of these knuckleheads. John Grisham, James Patterson. Suze Orman is very good. Last year, I read The Count of Monte Cristo .”

The rest of the boys nodded reverently.

“Why do they call you Oslik?” Slava said tentatively to a skinny boy in jeans and a sweatshirt. “Oslik” meant “donkey.”

“Oslik?” Leonard answered for him, grinning. “Oslik!” he said, and brayed. “Why do we call you Oslik?”

“I don’t have an elevator in my building,” Oslik said, sniggering. “We came back from shopping one day and had to carry it all the way to the fifth floor.”

“Like a donkey!” Leonard said.

Oslik laughed with everyone else.

“If Oslik thinks I am going to marry him in these conditions,” said a short, bulbous girl who was helping to set the table, “he’s severely mistaken.” Everyone laughed again.

“Boys!” Vera shouted. “Positions, please! The table’s almost ready. Leonard, please pour? Girls, who’s drinking what? Vodka for me.”

While everyone was trooping toward the table, Slava’s cell phone rang. He had opened it by the time he realized he shouldn’t have: It would be Grandfather requesting an update. He’d stand over you counting thrusts if you let him.

“Hey,” Arianna said. “You’re somewhere.”

Slava froze. After too long without speaking, he dashed to a corner of the living room. “Funeral,” he blurted out.

“What?” she said.

“The shiva?” He worked with what he had given himself. “We’re trying it out. Like you said.”

“Oh — okay. It’s only the seven days after — Oh, it doesn’t matter. Good for you. Okay, no problem. I’m sorry to interrupt. Tell everyone my condolences. From your work friend.” She laughed quietly.

“But what was it?” Slava said. Looking up, he saw Vera observing him skeptically. He realized he was wedging himself into a corner, his hand covering the phone. He straightened, as if talking to no one other than Grandfather.

“A club, a band,” she said. “No big deal.”

“That works well for us,” Slava said, trying to sound casual.

“Sla-va! Everything’s ready,” Vera shouted in English. Several people behind her whooped, laughter following. Slava looked at her hatefully.

A long, stinging pause on the other end. Then Arianna said: “I should run.”

“Hold on—”

“I’ll see you on Monday, okay?” she said, and hung up.

Slava cursed himself. Then Vera. Then himself. Vera called for him again.

When everyone had sat down and the thimbles had been filled by Leonard’s pink hand, Vera raised her glass.

“The hosts, Verochka, are supposed to raise the first glass,” Leonard said.

“Leonard,” Lara hissed. “You know I don’t mind. Vera is like a sister.”

“Thank you, Larochka,” Vera said. “This one’s been reading The Count of Monte Cristo too much, with his table etiquette.” Everyone laughed as Leonard frowned, and Slava understood that Vera was the only person at the table permitted to contradict him. “I would like to welcome Slava to our table,” Vera went on in Russian. “And I would like to say a word in honor of Slava’s grandmother, who passed away a week ago. A proud woman and a strong woman. I remember her from when I was a little girl. She was so kind, but you never messed with her!”

Again, the table laughed. Oslik slapped the table. “For grandmothers!” he announced.

“Babushka, oh, babushka,” Leonard recited with cautious dreaminess. His tone meant that the words were coming from a poem. He was hoping to regain the upper hand of the conversation. Everyone turned to him, but he couldn’t recall the remainder of the lines. “Something, something!” he rescued himself, and everyone laughed.

“Slava, what’s it like to be at a Russian table?” Vera said as everyone drank. “Different from your American friends?”

“It’s very intimate,” Slava said, hoping that he was providing the response she wanted.

Everyone burst into hysterical laughter, Leonard’s eyes gleaming with his now indisputable restoration to the crown of the male pyramid. Vera laid a hand on Slava’s arm. Slava felt her breath on the edge of his earlobe. “ Intimno is for the bedroom only,” she said in Russian. “At a table like this, you say it’s very warm, or close.”

Slava bulged his eyes for the benefit of the group. The laughter redoubled. Then Slava laid a hand on Leonard’s forearm and made flirty eyes. Oslik was so gratified that he had to pull his chair back from the table so he could double over.

“To Slava!” Oslik said. “To Slava!” all of them echoed, even Leonard, slapping Slava’s back so hard that Slava nearly spat out a piece of herring.

“So we were promised stories about Italy,” Lara said after everyone had settled down.

“Let’s eat,” Slava tried to encourage everyone.

“Come on!”

“The bourgeois look to the past and the proletariat looks to the future,” Slava said, thinking a Soviet slogan might divert them, but he bungled part of it.

“I remember,” Vera said in Russian, looking at Slava, “Slava’s family had finally been called to the consul. For the interview if you were going to be let into America. And nobody speaks one drop of English. But you can’t have a seven-year-old boy answering. So they all stumble how they can, and then the consul asks, ‘Why do you want to go to America?’” She said this last part in English. “And nobody understands him. Moments like this — I mean, you know — enough to kill the application. Because they are rejecting people already by this time. Go to Israel, they say.

“And Slava understands, but how can he answer? So he says, ‘I want to meet my aunt Frida.’ And the consul laughs. And everyone laughs. And meanwhile, his mother or father — who was it, Slava? — understands. Because they practiced this answer, you know. ‘Why do you want to emigrate to America?’ Svoboda . And how do you say svoboda ?”

“Freedom!” the table shouted.

“How do you remember the word?”

“Aunt Frida!” the table shouted as one.

“And so after Slava said ‘Aunt Frida,’ one of them remembered and said, ‘Freedom.’ And they passed. You can say that without him, his family wouldn’t be here.” She beamed proudly.

The table whooped and rocked with applause. “To Slava!” Oslik whooped. “To Slava!” everyone shouted. Slava gave in and smiled sheepishly. Thimbles knocked his, splashing cognac onto his wrist, palms kneaded his shoulders, and Leonard launched into the “Marseillaise.” Next to him, Vera shone with a thousand lights.

Three hours later, a final piece of herring gleaming undesirably in a small lake of oil and a pack’s worth of cigarettes crushed into a porcelain ashtray, the group had switched positions. The boys were at the table, finishing the cognac, and the girls were smoking on the couch. Leonard’s blazer clung limply to the back of his chair. He had unbuttoned the upper two buttons of his shirt and hung his arm across Slava’s shoulder, as if the two of them had served under Kharkov together. Now and then Slava heard his name in the circle of girls and peered over Leonard’s Pushkinian curls to make out what was being said. It was difficult because Leonard was breathing heavily into his temple. Slava looked at Vera, who looked at him, as if she came equipped with a device that alerted her every time he wanted her attention. She nodded and smiled.