Read A Replacement Life Online
Authors: Boris Fishman
A Replacement Life (17 page)
“Not that I—”
“It’s okay. You’re right.”
“Tomorrow—”
“Just give me five minutes.”
She cantilevered her left leg over his right and lifted herself above him. He could feel on his groin the thin thread of hair between her legs. Even soured by sleep, her breath was fragrant—soap, musk, sunflower seeds. She cradled him in her hand as her lips descended on his. Quickly, he was hard, and she lowered herself on top of him, closing her eyes. She rocked above him steadily, as if he weren’t there. As she neared orgasm, she leaned forward until their chests touched, both sweating. The pallor of her breasts was translucent against his chest. Coming close, she placed her palms around his head and began to thrust herself into him. He had never been fucked that way before. He had never been fucked.
She didn’t open her eyes until she had come. Then she kissed him on the forehead and said, “Thanks, honey.”
He rode home with Arianna drying on his legs. He showered for a long time,
just thinking. The violent creak of the stair door as he headed back out roused Irvin from a reverie of Albanian vineyards.
“Hello, Mr. Gellma,” he sighed. “Valk?” He walked two fingers through the air. “A little raining.” He pointed at the ceiling, frowning.
“I think it’s clearing up,” Slava said.
Irv, to which the doorman’s name had been reduced by some of the tenants, nodded with the enthusiasm of an Albanian spotting a Serb in his garden.
You fockin moron, you could be relax at home on day off, but you go walk in rains.
“Vait, pliz,” he said. He opened the delivery closet and rifled through coats. He withdrew a long, sturdy umbrella with a carved handle of a zebra hanging its head. “Mr. Seetrick forget,” he said. “But Mr. Seetrick Saturday is dinner come out only—you bring back, okay?”
“Thanks, Erv.” In deference to liberal values or immigrant solidarity, Slava insisted on calling the Albanian by his actual name, and often wondered if the doorman heard the subtle distinction. On this matter, Erv/Irv kept Slava in suspense, which led Slava to try harder in ever more deformed ways, so that he ended up addressing the doorman by some variation of “Aaaairvvv . . .” The latter’s mystified distaste in reaction to this
was
clear, though he did not feel entitled to correct a tenant. America had suffered him greater indignities.
“Vait, vait, vait.” Irvin held up a hand. “Vait.” He disappeared under the podium and emerged with half a loaf of bread in a plastic bag. He banged it against the podium. “For birds,” he said. “You give.”
Slava hesitated. “Maybe you do it, Erv.”
“They hungry now,” Irvin said, disappointed. “Afternoon—hungry.”
Slava obeyed and took the loaf.
“Small pieces, give small pieces,” Irvin said, joining his thumb and index finger. “Bon appétit.”
Slava valked. He valked to the river, closed his eyes, and sniffed at the salt in the air. He was an object of indifference to the one thousand pigeons hopping around the pavement, but when he opened Irvin’s plastic bag—after ten minutes of trying to unwork the impossible knot, uttering an obscenity, and finally tearing it open—their feelings changed. Following Irvin’s instruction, he tore off small pieces and scattered them gently. The pigeons wobbled toward the bread and pecked, bopping one another.
In Arianna’s bed an hour before, he only wanted to leave, but now, without her, he longed for her, as if he had a question and she could answer it. Had he just argued with her because he really disagreed or because he resented receiving instructions? If she claimed to find him interesting, why did she forget to ask his opinion? And when she did, she argued against him. In frustration, he chucked the loaf at the railing. It thudded to the ground, scattering the pigeons. They regrouped and stared at him resentfully. He gave them the middle finger and walked off toward the library.
The Yorkville branch of the New York Public Library swam in lazy yellow light. The children’s section was full of toddlers crawling on the mats and shrieking occasionally to protest their confinement while their mothers murmured over the baby-size tables. Slava found the reference librarian and asked for good books on the Holocaust in the East. Books with dates, numbers, street names. Books to make an invented claim letter read like a beautiful woman who could cook, too, if Israel Abramson were the judge.
“You sure you don’t want Baby Einstein?” the librarian said. He cast a destructive look in the direction of the hollering children. “Research project?”
“Fiction,” Slava said.
The librarian nodded. “That’s all the fashion now.”
Dusk was beginning to settle by the time Slava dialed Israel. Listening to the ring, he watched a man and woman work at a kitchen counter in an apartment across the courtyard, strains of brass in their stereo. Briefly, the music swelled, and she bumped his rear end with hers.
“Hello?” Israel said again.
Slava snapped to. “You’re wrong,” he said.
“Those were my son’s favorite words.”
“I’m sitting here with half the library, Israel. Minsk ghetto—formed date such-and-such.” Slava peered at his notepad. “July twentieth. A hundred thousand inmates. Largest ghetto in German-occupied territory in the Soviet Union. Et cetera.”
“Okay. Very good.”
“First of all, someone applying for restitution is not a historian. The people who wrote these books know how many inmates there were. The people in the ghetto didn’t get a fact sheet.”
“Okay, but they know when it started, they know where they lived.”
“You ever apply for anything, Israel, Yuri ever apply for a scholarship? You’re the guy reading the claims—
every
claim is going to say it started on July twentieth, we lived at such-and-such an address. But you can’t give him an address. They have records for that. You’ve got to—I don’t know—
distract
him. You’ve got to make him not care that there’s no address, that there’s actually no verifiable detail. That’s how they check facts, I told you. I know from someone who knows. Tell a story they’ll forget it’s a story. That’s our best chance.”
“Slavchik, my bird, we’re not trying to get into Harvard here. We want to have a boring little story about poor Jews in the Holocaust.” Israel cleared his nose. “Another old Jew, pity, let’s give him a penny. He starts reading
Anna Karenina
, he’s going to have questions. Babel is dead, my friend. All the best Jews got killed. It’s the boring Jews who got left. Let’s give them a penny. You follow?”
“You’re wrong,” Slava said. “I think.”
“You want to hypnotize him. You want to tell him a nice fairy tale.”
“Something like that.”
There was a pause. “I don’t know,” Israel said. “We’re following you now, Gogol. Do what you think.”
“By the way, Gogol was an anti-Semite,” Slava said.
“And you think Jews are a heap of luck?”
Slava hung up with the pyrrhic satisfaction of a child getting his way. The problem remained. For all the history he read, he couldn’t insert his grandmother into it. Pushing off the endless small-font paragraphs in the books the librarian had given him, he could smell the rain-soaked canvas of the trucks that transported prisoners to their workdays breaking concrete outside the ghetto, but he couldn’t smell her. What kind of brain was it that could run so effortlessly with one thing but not with another? He needed something to start him, but he couldn’t figure out what. No matter what notes Slava made on one of the legal pads he had stolen from the office, the exercise ended in him staring at the wall or at the couple across the courtyard.
Eventually, they left the kitchen. Probably to the dining room to have the dinner they’d made. And then to the bedroom in a buzzed glaze, half-dream, half-reality, the mellowness of body next to body, until they fell asleep, laughably early, the television chattering softly, the bed light carelessly on till the morning.
Around the courtyard, windows were blinking on. Arianna hadn’t called. Strange to be together every weeknight but apart on Saturday. Slava dialed her cell phone, but it rang until voice mail. The evening was his, just as he’d asked.
He pictured Arianna in the ghetto instead of Grandmother. Arianna in the midst of a dusty ghetto street flanked by flower beds outside the windows and small gardens in the backyard—homes, somehow, even if inside a ghetto. How effortlessly Arianna objected to having Grandmother’s money rerouted to Grandfather. (Did she object? She actually prohibited it—gently, chidingly: You can’t.) Not a glimmer of doubt passed over her face. But what if Arianna had eaten potato peels for breakfast and dinner (no lunch) for a year? If she had watched the pale skin come off her beautiful legs from wading in swamps day after day? Would she be of two minds then? Could she go sixty years without mentioning what had been taken, six years without complaining as her body undid itself? And if, in turn, Grandmother had been born in America, would she object in Arianna’s fashion? Here his imagination did not dare to go, a sacrilege to imagine so casually the undoing of so many deaths.
He had what Grandfather had said: a factory, a raid, bodies in a basement, a dead child, a bottle of milk. He had what the books in front of him said. He had what he had about Grandmother. The rest would have to find itself as he went. There was an extra layer of confusion in that his protagonist would have to be concealed as Israel Abramson, but that was just a name on top of the page. Was there a reason Israel couldn’t have a sister? Was the beauty of invention not that he very much could?
Please describe, in as much detail as you can, where the Subject was during the years 1939 to 1945.
Israel Abramson
It was after the four-day pogrom in July 1942 that I decided I would try to escape from the ghetto, come what may. In truth, it was my sister who decided.
Our job in the ghetto was to sort through the clothes of the murdered. Skirts here, pants here. After a while, the Germans wised up and made people undress first. By the end of ’42, the clothes had no holes or blood. You could still smell the people in the fabric, though: sweat and hay and sour milk and something else that must have been fear. It became ordinary to hold a dead person’s clothes in your hand, to see a dead body in the street. One time Sonya—that was my sister—saw an infant trying to get milk out of its mother’s breast, but the mother was dead, completely dead. And you had to walk by, keep going.
One day we were returning home from the warehouse where I sorted the clothes. It was me, Sonya, two other girls, and a guard in the back of the truck. When we were turning onto Komsomol’skaya, the guard leaned into me and said, “There will be a raid tonight. Don’t go home. Hide somewhere.” I said I couldn’t leave without Sonya, but he made clear the offer was only for me. I didn’t know what to do, but Sonya bulged her eyes and mouthed GO. “Now,” the guard said. So I jumped. I will always remember him. Herr Karitko. He was old. Thin, wrinkled face. Not tall. Maybe he liked boys. You had different kinds of Germans.
Already, there were bodies in the streets. The Belarusians who worked as policemen for the Germans, they were even more sadistic. Tables had been set out in the streets. They went from street to street, sitting down for a glass of beer and a plate of drumsticks between executions. You know what a drumstick looks like after you haven’t seen one in a year? I had scurvy; I’d lost half the teeth in my mouth. I always kept it closed and mumbled because they shot you on sight if you weren’t healthy.
My mind was racing because where was Sonya? War makes you make decisions no person should have to make. But also she was the kind of girl who, if she told you to jump from the truck, you jumped. She was steelier than all us boys in the yard. In fact, she was the only girl allowed to play with the boys, not that she asked anyone’s permission. One time the boys from the next street were over for a soccer game, and they tripped Khema something awful. He had snot and blood coming out of his nose. Sonya went to the boy who had done it, a real lunk, a meter eighty and not even thirteen, and said, “Watch out for the branch,” and pointed up. When he looked up, she kneed him in the groin and kicked him in the shin. While he wailed, she brought
him over to Khema by the ear and held him like that until he apologized and wiped up Khema’s snot with his own jersey. So she was like that.
I didn’t know where to go except our neighbor Isaac because Mother and Father weren’t home yet from the factory. (They sewed German uniforms.) Isaac lived with his young wife and a child. They had a double cellar, and said we were welcome there whenever we needed it, may G-d spare us from needing it.
When I got there, Sonya was tapping her foot on the floorboard. “You take your time, brother,” she said, and winked. I was about to ask, but there was no time.
We had just closed the door to Isaac’s house when the Germans appeared on the street. We were in such a rush to get inside the cellar that Isaac closed the floor latch poorly. By then it was too late to pull it shut; they were entering the house. But what our luck was—one of them jumped in through the window. And he landed on the floor latch, closing it all the way.
We heard them upstairs. “Come out,
Juden
, cheepi-cheepi.” I wasn’t breathing and clutched Sonya’s hand. I could barely see, in the darkness, how many of us were edged into the cellar. A dozen, maybe. Isaac’s wife, Shulamit, was next to me, holding their baby. Somebody wept into a fist.
When I heard the sound, my blood stopped. At first it was soft, colicky, like a whine, but then it got louder, pained. Shulamit covered her child’s face with hers and began kissing its lips frantically to stop the noise. “Hush,
mein liebe
, hush,
ikh bet dir
, hush.” I can hear her saying it now. She would have swallowed that child if she could. But the baby continued to bawl. It became quiet upstairs. For a moment, there was only one sound in the world.
By now, my eyes had adjusted to the dark, and I could see Sonya staring at Shulamit. It frightened me to see that look on her face, to see her capable of that look. I can’t say how much of what happened next is because Sonya stared at Shulamit as only Sonya could stare. Would she have torn the child from Shulamit’s bosom and done it herself if Shulamit hadn’t? Maybe my eyes were merely playing tricks. Maybe I was so afraid that I imagined Sonya had something to do with it. I have never told this story to anyone, and I am telling it now only because Sonya is dead, as my parents—
—are dead. As all my friends are dead. I am the Last Mohican, as my grandchildren call me.
I didn’t see Shulamit do it. She was right next to me, so I couldn’t have missed it. I must have shut my eyes, unable to watch. When I opened them, the crying had stopped. Shulamit held a white square pillow over the child. It had stopped moving.
Eventually, the soldiers brought every pot crashing to the floor and stormed out. When darkness fell, some of us crawled out to the small garden on the other side of the cellar and buried the child, Isaac scooping out the
loam with his hands, his eyes blank. Shulamit didn’t respond even to Isaac. She lost her mind. She survived the war, but she was never right in her mind again.
We ate from the garden for four days, beets and carrots, one meter away from the dead child. The garden kept us alive.
After four days, we peered outside. It was quiet. Everywhere, bodies. Both of the families who shared the house where my family lived had been killed. The pogrom had started during the workday, so Mother and Father had remained in the factory, hiding in a steel bunker. When they returned to our street and saw the murdered neighbors, my father fell on his knees, thinking his children were among them. Isaac walked to him, barely sentient, and touched his shoulder. “Yours are alive,” he said.
They had to pull us out of the cellar by the armpits. I was embarrassed to need so much help. Somebody had given Father a liter of milk. In his hands, it was as white and clean as fresh snow. He gave it to me first as the boy, but I gave it to Sonya, though I couldn’t look her in the eyes as I did. She drank from the bottle with the hunger of an animal. I hated her in that moment.
When she was finished, she looked at me and said: “We have to get out. It doesn’t matter if we die doing it.” The Germans were spreading stories that the Jews escaping from the ghetto were Nazi plants, infected with VD, so the partisans, who didn’t exactly need help disliking Jews, were sometimes executing escaped ghetto inmates on sight. But if we were going to die, she said, we were going to die by a Russian hand, not a German. She would persuade Mother and Father as well.
I wanted to disagree, but listening to her also made me want to be more of a man. I had closed my eyes when Shulamit placed the pillow over her child, but I wouldn’t close my eyes now. Whatever it took, we would escape.