Boris Fishman - A Replacement Life

“You’re always asking,” Slava said. “Here it is. Here they are.”

“Show it to me,” she said.

They walked without plan, happenings from long ago reminding themselves to Slava. In this store, his grandfather had purchased a mink for Slava’s mother without paying a dollar. The owner of the store, a man whose existence depended on wringing every penny out of the mink in Grandfather’s hands, had ended up pleading with him to take it for free, though Slava didn’t recall the exact reason or, more likely, was too young to comprehend the machinations, though he was old enough to understand that minks weren’t free and watched his grandfather from below with wonder. That was Grandfather. Arianna reiterated her desire to meet him. People always wanted to meet Grandfather when you told them about him, Slava said. They lit up.

Here were Uzbeks, here Tajiks, here Georgians, here Moldovans. Here you could get a manicure and pedicure for ten dollars. (This truly elevated Arianna’s eyebrows.) They were staring at the row of identically frost-haired women working the chairs of the beauty salon when Slava froze. Without thinking, he had brought Arianna to a neighborhood where half a dozen homes had enjoyed from him forged letters. What an amateur. His little heart had been wounded — he wanted to show her something that he, not she, knew, and he’d just yielded to the impulse. Grandfather had passed down his fraudulent soul? Slava was a pinkie on Grandfather’s hand, no more.

“What is it?” Arianna said.

“So I just wanted to show you,” he said quickly. “We can go.” He cursed himself a second time; he was retreating as artlessly as he had approached.

“What?” she said. “We just got here. I want to go drink hot tea, Uzbek-style. Take me, please.”

As they walked to the boardwalk, he tried to map the homes that required a wide berth and half listened as Arianna babbled on about their surroundings. Where he saw desperation and scraping, she saw another act in New York’s great ethnic circus. As they walked past the Key Food, he thought he spotted old Anna Kots waddling out with a grocery cart, but it was a double. At the chaikhana , he strongly recommended a table in the back, away from the windows. It was cooler by the windows, Arianna said — they had been flung open, the sea spangling with a heat-crazed blue light past the wide beach. “I thought you wanted to be hot, like the Uzbeks,” he said, and she obeyed.

“What is it?” she said when they were seated.

“Nothing, nothing,” he said.

“Is it strange for you to be here?”

He was saved by the arrival of a waitress in an Uzbek rug cap. An earpiece wire coiled out of her ear. “Are you in the FBI?” he joked to her in Russian. She laughed — this was how the servers communicated with the kitchen. Arianna waited for a translation, but none came. She was asked, however, to choose the tea. Realizing that Slava was accompanied by an American, the waitress became formal. When she returned, she set down the tray and held up each item: “This is green tea, please— kuk-choi . This is spoons, please.” She held up two rug caps: yes or no? Slava said no, Arianna said yes. The waitress permitted herself a smile and said in English: “I leave, you decide.”

“Why does your grandfather know how Uzbeks drink tea?” Arianna said when the waitress departed.

“That was where he was evacuated during the war,” Slava said cautiously.

“They’re talking about expanding eligibility,” she said. “It’s in the paper. He might qualify in the end.”

“We’re hoping,” Slava said twice as cautiously.

“I can’t imagine what it’s like there.”

“He was conscription age; he would piss himself in the street so recruiters would think he was retarded.”

“You always talk about him.”

“You asked about him.”

“I meant you never talk about your parents. And I only talk about my parents.”

“I even have my grandfather’s last name instead of my father’s,” Slava said. “They made the decisions, I guess. I would like to meet the Eagle.”

“Sandra has her charms, too.”

“I mean that I like the way you feel about him more.”

She looked toward the water. “Do you know that in seven years in New York, I haven’t seen the ocean.”

“How does it compare to the other one?”

“Whenever I read The Stranger , when he kills the Arab on the beach, this is how I imagine it. The water so blue that it’s black. And the sun so bright that everything feels bleached.”

“You’ve read it more than once?”

“I reread books all the time. Especially if they made you read it in high school. Then it’s like a measuring stick. This is what I thought about it at seventeen, this is what I think about it now. I used to love One Hundred Years of Solitude —if you leave out all the chauvinist crap. But I couldn’t get through it last year. The woman eats dirt, the colonel’s blood flows from the war back to the house where he was born… so melodramatic. It’s me right now, not the book; I’ll try again in a couple of years. I think good books should be translated once per generation. I have a Stranger from 1948 and 1982, but from England, and a 1988 American. They’re all different.” She sipped her tea, holding the piala from below with both palms. “García Márquez was brought up by his grandparents. That’s the way I think of you.”

He laughed. “You’re rambling. Are you nervous?”

She smiled. “Maybe.”

He extended a hand toward her. She placed a palm inside it. It was warm from the bottom of the tea bowl.

“Was Grandfather telling the truth?” Slava said. “Are you less warm because you are as hot as the weather?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Let’s go outside and check.”

Miraculously, the ocean was stingingly crisp despite having been under assault from the sun for two months. It would stay swimmable until October, this guest welcome to linger. Arianna squealed as the water hit her toes. The rocketing spray climbed up her legs. He had forgotten all about the neighborhood’s minefield of betrayal. Momentarily, he felt exempted from responsibility.

“It smells like fish,” she said.

“No, fish smells like it,” he said. They laughed. She kicked the surf in his direction. He filled his mouth with seawater and wouldn’t stop chasing her until he had squirted it down her back.

They fell asleep on the sand, his rolled-up T-shirt for his pillow and his chest for hers. He smelled the brine on her face as he dozed off. His last thought before dozing off was: He was his best with her and his worst.

The sun had slunk off by the time he awoke. Arianna still slept, so he didn’t dare move. The departing yolk of the sun streaked a final tantrum of pinks, violets, and golds, a better sunset than the hot, sweaty day deserved. He remembered reading in one of his newspapers that postcard sunsets were actually caused by excess smog. Just as human ash could give you gorgeous five-pound tomatoes. Just as Yevgeny Gelman, Israel Abramson, and Lazar Rudinsky, a hundred years later, would give you Arianna Bock. Everything in between was a loss, a write-off.

When she awoke, they wandered back down to the ocean’s edge, the lapping sheets of the Atlantic theirs alone except for a couple petting by the lifeguard stand. The evening was taking on a bruised purple glow. A lone streetlight called them back from the boardwalk. The sand beneath them had cooled quickly, but if you buried your feet, it was still warm below.

“You were born over there,” she said, and pointed into the darkness.

“The ocean in the dark freaks me out,” he said.