Boris Fishman - A Replacement Life

Slava awoke with a start, ramming his head into a shelf above Arianna’s bed. Whose idea had it been to build a shelf directly above the place that one slept? Was its use, whatever it was, not outweighed by the uselessness of ramming one’s head into it immediately upon waking, as Slava had expected to since his first night with Arianna — the expectation haunted his sleep, and when he wasn’t dreaming about Peter Devicki, he dreamed that he had rammed his head into the shelf, only to wake up and realize no, not yet. Finally, it had happened, and the dull ache, along with the weary recognition of something one has expected to take place for some time, spread across the back of his head as Arianna shifted in her sleep.

She slept like a tank. War could erupt on West End Avenue. Not that he could say a word about the shelf. She kept her books there, or her night glass of water. “You’re not concerned that a glass of water is going to end up on your face in the middle of the night?” he asked one morning. “You’re expecting an earthquake?” she answered, and he was made to dissolve in double entendres about earthquakes in bed. When they had sex afterward, he pushed with extra energy because he wanted the cursed glass to fall and show her, but it didn’t. The second time he mentioned the shelf, it wasn’t funny anymore. The third time, she simply pretended she hadn’t heard him.

Now she turned toward him and draped her hot leg over his thighs. This one’s body temperature rose to dangerous levels in the night, a fever that broke only with dawn, Slava massaging her suddenly blue fingertips until the color returned to them. For this reason, she had no air-conditioning, only ceiling fans attached to peeling, ornately molded ceilings by threadbare chains. Slava spent the night expecting to have his head mashed by the items on the shelf above his head and his legs by the fan dancing above him. That was the reason for his stupid dream! He slept in a state of constant anxiety.

She stirred. “I can hear you being angry in my sleep. What is it?”

He looked over. “I just rammed my head into the shelf.”

She rolled her eyes. “Slava, for Christ’s sake, we’ll remove the shelf. You’ll be a handy guy and remove the shelf.”

“I need coffee,” he said to say something.

“Make me a cup?” she said, trying to sound gentle, and turned to face the other side of the room.

He folded his arms across his chest and leaned his head gingerly against the perfidious shelf, a peace offering.

“You had a bad dream?” she said from the other side of the bed, her lips in her pillow.

“You ever think what you would do,” he said, “if someone said… You have two children, and someone says, ‘Choose which one lives.’”

“Jesus, Slava.” She sat up and looked back at him. “No,” she said flatly. “Can I answer after we have coffee?” She tossed aside the covers and rose. He watched her walk toward the bathroom, the sleeves of her T-shirt rolled up to her shoulders. At some point, she had started to wear underwear and a T-shirt to bed instead of the usual nothing. He wondered now if it was a small gesture of distance. All the same, Arianna Bock in underwear and a T-shirt was better than most girls naked. He swept aside his cover and followed her into the bathroom. Unwilling to miss the action, the cat darted inside after them.

She stood with her hands on the edge of the sink. Whenever she stood in place like this, she rested one foot against the ankle of the other, making a triangle of her legs. Sometimes, as she washed dishes late at night, he would sit at the kitchen table behind her and trace the curve of her ankles as they met each other at the tip of the triangle, an infinite loop.

He came up behind her and slid his arms inside hers, twenty fingers rimming the outer edge of the sink, the tips of hers still frightened and blue, his dark and thick next to hers.

“I don’t even know what we’re arguing about half the time,” she said. She swiveled inside his arms, facing him. “I think about that all day long. That’s not what I want to think about all day. I want to be calm.” The sleep was gone from her eyes, and she, too, stared at him with the weary recognition of something one has expected to take place for some time. “I’m scared,” she said. She exited the rim of his arms and sank down to the floor, running her arms around her legs. She vanished against the white subway tile.

He slid down next to her and took her fingers in his, rubbing out the blue sleep. The cat parked itself on the edge of the sink to listen in from above.

“If you sit on cold tile,” he said, trying for levity, “you won’t have kids. So the wives say in their tales.”

“I like when you tell me about those things,” she said. “You never talk about it.”

“Gentlemen have much to fear as well, Grandfather says.”

“Sexy talk,” she sighed. “How is he? With everything.”

“He’s more fine than he says,” Slava said. “He’s blessed. He never pays enough attention to anything for it to touch him.”

“Don’t say that,” she said.

“It’s the truth,” he said resentfully.

The weight of his secret pressed all about him, a stupid, blunt heaviness with no center or edge. He had to hold out only a little bit longer — the application deadline was just days away, and then he would be free, and they would be back to each other the way it was that first night. Slava didn’t want to think about the other possibility: that their sudden awkwardness had nothing to do with his secret. That it was, quite simply, them, that the introductory luster of their connection was a fraud now giving way to the pallid fact: They were foreigners to each other. Even in the midst of an argument, they wished to tear off each other’s clothes, but the depressing thought struck him that this wasn’t enough, necessarily.

He thought of Otto, the day’s first recollection out of the hundred to come, an unpleasant dream that wasn’t a dream. Slava copped a bit of martyrdom from the victims of fate scattered around South Brooklyn — of course he had to be caught. At Century , he could invent entire townships and newspapers without raising flags. Here, no. Someone else gets away with murder. He — he pays.

The list of letters that remained to be written before the deadline burned from the pocket of his jeans across the room, as if it contained the phone numbers of other women and not eighty-year-olds. He had read that a group of survivors was lobbying to press the German parliament to revise the terms of restitution to include a broader cross section of evacuees and, for the first time, Red Army soldiers. He wanted it to end and he didn’t want it to end.

“Does your head hurt?” she said. “From the shelf.”

“Oh. No. No, it can stay. Really.”

“No, we’ll get rid of it. It was already here—”

“No, no.”

They stopped speaking at the same time.

“Something’s strange,” she said, a stiff smile on her face.

“Something,” he nodded.

He extended his arms. Slowly, warily, she lowered herself into them. The cat leaped off the counter, its paws hitting the tile with a dull thud, and joined them. Slava had never had animals, but he liked the cat. In the moments when he and Arianna didn’t know how to be warm to each other, they could be warm to the animal. The animal didn’t mind. It nestled between them, a package of simple, dumb, euphoric flesh, and issued a great yawn. The two humans made jokes about how boring their fight was.

“All right,” she said. “Let’s do something. Unless you’re working.”

“I’m taking a day off,” he announced.

She produced a sound of disbelief.

“Easy, now,” he said.