Boris Fishman - A Replacement Life

“You have it wrong,” Slava whispered at his glass. He was sick to his stomach.

“Your poor lip is twitching,” Otto observed.

Slava raised his finger to his lips, but they were still. “You’re wrong,” he repeated. “Otherwise, why haven’t you called the police?”

“The police?” Otto laughed. “Are we on an episode of television? The police. Perhaps I should call the lawyers as well. No, Mr. Gelman, I don’t want to talk about the legal side. The lawyers can talk about the legal side. The newspapers can talk about the legal side. We will talk about the human side.”

“Why can’t you just let them all in?” Slava said.

“Because I have the conscience of my position, Mr. Gelman. And also some pride as a starting investigator! Now I need to know. I need the satisfaction of holding my prey in my mouth. You have poisoned me with this hunger. I am your creation!”

“So then just take them all out,” Slava said. “Every single one with your — your — your umgang …”

“It is an insane language, I agree. No, Mr. Gelman. Though I have been drinking from the cup of God’s power, I have not crossed into lawlessness. I can’t take them all out; what if some are real? All I have is my conclusions. This is not a dictatorship. I need proof. Either proof or a confession.”

“And you don’t have proof.”

“Depends on what you mean by proof,” Otto said. “I don’t have the gun still smoking, but I have enough to call Herr Schuler.”

“Unless you get a confession.”

“Unless I get a confession. Then I can take care of the matter on my own.” Otto took a sip from his glass. It remained over half full. He observed the baseball game on the television above the bar. “I only want to understand what is a shortstop,” he said. “The bases I understand. The hitters I understand. Bunting, designated, pinch — okay. But a shortstop?”

“Why this charade?” Slava said. “Why not just call and say, ‘It’s you’?”

“Do you think it didn’t work?” Otto said, a little hurt. “Remember, I am a novice. But if I said on the phone, ‘Aha, it’s you!’ or we must meet right away, I steal from myself an opportunity. Oh, I am giving away all my amateur secrets.

“No, Mr. Gelman. If I had real evidence against you, of course I would attack. I had no evidence except an anonymous verbal report and my sleuthing, so it must be a matter of conscience. Better to permit a guilty conscience to keep walking around, to increase the weight of its guilt! Unless you are a monster, a psychopath , in which case it doesn’t make a difference.” He considered Slava coquettishly. “You are not a psychopath, are you, Mr. Gelman?

“Also, I will ask you to remember that I was quite vague on the subject of evidence, quite vague. If I say, yes, there is evidence, there’s no room this way or that”—with his big hands, Otto enacted a fish trying to maneuver from a trap—“why, you would stop worrying, for better or worse. Because it is done. They say that at Sevastopol, the people were in a terrible fright that the enemy would attack openly and take Sevastopol immediately. But when they saw that the enemy preferred a regular siege, they were delighted! The thing would drag on for two months at least, and they could relax!”

Otto sipped from his beer philosophically. “You don’t know this, but I am, in general, a student of military campaigns, Mr. Gelman — it is my great petting interest. To visit the neighborhood of Brooklyn Heights: You are standing where George Washington stood! There is history underneath your feet! New York City is a war, a constant war! In Berlin, truth and justice is with the lower classes, but here in New York, it is with money and power. And all the young people, instead of making doodles and eating drugs and scratching the cars of rich people, are pursuing this power and this money, ha-ha! They want to defeat the people with power and money, but only to take their positions! They want to eat their lamb chops! It is war by other methods. There is no rebellion. Which is a rebellion in itself, wouldn’t you say?”

Slava didn’t speak.

Otto leaned back on his stool. “It is poor manners to give compliments to oneself, Mr. Gelman, but by the way your lip is continuing to twitch, I think I had all the effect that I wanted.”

This time Slava kept from raising his hand to his mouth.

Otto sighed. “How terrible for someone of talent and promise to labor in darkness. Well, the subjects of the letters know, but we both know that isn’t the same. You wanted to get caught, Mr. Gelman. Tell the truth. The similar maneuvers, the details?” He rummaged in the manila folder. “Look: Everyone is from Minsk! Night watch here, night watch here. A ferrier here, a ferrier here. The war took place only in the Minsk ghetto?”

Slava ignored him.

Otto shrugged and faced the bar again. “I understand the attraction of telling me to go to high hell, Mr. Gelman. I release your letters to Herr Schuler, he holds a press conference, there is a leak, an excerpt in Die Zeit , then the International Herald Tribune , the New York Times … An audience of millions. Only no one knows who is the author. And what am I offering you in exchange? An audience of one? It’s not the readership of Die Zeit , but it isn’t an audience of zero. One person has meaning. And unlike Herr Schuler, I will know who the author is. I will know it is you. And with me, I take your word, the false ones go out, but the real ones stay in. With Herr Schuler, everything is under suspicion, everything . I am sure you understand the full weight of this, Mr. Gelman. Tell me which you forged, and you save the ones who are real. Don’t tell me, and you send them all under the guillotine.”

Slava kept staring blankly. He could not account for what would come out of his mouth if he spoke. He had to wait him out. Walk out, think, think .

“Mr. Gelman?” Otto said.

“I understand,” Slava croaked.

Otto slid the folder back into his briefcase and slid from his bar stool. “They have less time than you, Mr. Gelman,” he said. “You must choose them.” He laid a soft palm on Slava’s shoulder. “I’ll be waiting for you.”

TUESDAY, AUGUST 29, 2006

The earth is the color of chocolate, so damp and moist it looks like you can spread it on bread. It runs into everything — coffee, underwear, letters. Slava is writing a letter. In Yiddish. His hands make out the sinewy bends and blocks, the letters bowing and scraping. The battalion commander is down in the trench, too, smoking a Belomor, the filter crushed between his fingers, and laughing at the letter.

“You owe the fascists, Yid. We weren’t distracted, you’d get your ass strung up for writing letters like that.” He kicks some dirt toward Slava, but halfheartedly, with a friendly contempt. “So it’s like they say, then,” he says. “The Yids and fascists are in cahoots.” He laughs again, mirthlessly this time, loses his smile, spits.

Several yards from the trench stands a simple wooden table with two high-backed chairs lodged unevenly into a mound of black earth-chocolate. The table has been hacked together from the Belarusian birch that rises synonymously all around. The chairs — wicker chairs, with seat cushions tied by neat bows at the backs — are the first chairs the Gelmans had in America, lifted on a lucky evening from some curbside.

Every minute or so, the table and chairs tremble from a distant eruption. Uncle Aaron — Grandfather’s brother, the unkissed virgin whose fingers Grandfather hunted with a butcher knife to disqualify him from the draft — sits in one of the chairs, his arms folded, looking at a heap of mackerel dripping oil onto a jaundiced copy of Komsomol’skaia Pravda, the words running together. His field jacket is unbuttoned. A tuft of chest hair pokes out of the open collar.