A Replacement Life (35 page)

Slava sat down next to her. He smelled the vodka on her tongue, mixed with strawberries. Every part of her had a different scent, like departments in a department store.

“I don’t know,” Slava said.

“Anybody else knows?” she said.

Slava shook his head.

“So . . .” Her head hung forward as she tried to understand.

“If I tell them which ones I faked, they will quietly take those out. As if they never came in. That they can do.”

“And if you don’t tell them?”

“They have no choice but to make a public statement. Make it an official investigation.”

Vera exhaled slowly and fell back.

“If I deny everything,” Slava said, “that’s kaput for Settledecker’s plan, too. If they have to go public, there’s no way anyone’s approving an
expansion
of eligibility requirements.”

She sat up. “Slava.” Her hand clasped his arm. She was sober, conspiratorial, in control. Lazar Timofeyevich was right about his granddaughter. “You need to say you have no idea what they are talking about. I know how this works. They’re not going to do press conference. No way. They will just make private investigation inside by themselves. They’re saying it to do the guilt to you. It’s— What do you call it? With cards.”

“Bluffing.”

“Exactly. If they can’t make you confess, they will not risk press conference. Think about it. If no Claims Conference, no job for them, no salary. They’re never gonna go for that. They will bury it. You start saying yes to anything, and you’re guilty of— It’s not going to end. Don’t be a
pioner
. Boy Scout.”

She studied Slava’s face to see what he thought, her attention resting on him like a mother’s. A vein came through her temple, steady and unruffled, a blue valley. Slava knew every bend here.

“It’s going to be okay,” she said. “I promise you. I will make.” Her hand rose to his cheek and playfully scratched the stubble. His hands answered her—her face, her neck, her shoulders. She wore a V-neck silk blouse, dark blue except for black bands at the hems of the sleeves.
The knobs of Vera’s shoulders were as round as her face, thick and solid. As she shimmied out of her skirt, a Soviet woman’s coarse panty hose remained, and then nothing. In three years at
Century,
Slava marveled viciously, he had made no advance, but this bounty was his just weeks after meeting Vera again. She was like the language they shared: He had done nothing to earn it, but it was his. He resented her for accepting him so easily. But these were the perks he could expect. If Slava gave up his mysterious objections, this was what awaited, the dark collapse between Vera’s legs said.

His hands stopped.

“What is it?” she said.

“I can’t,” he said. “I’m sorry.” He made himself look at her.

Her eyes became frightened and uncomprehending. Then came a look of loathing and disgust, as if he had failed a manly duty. He gave her an ugly, meaningless smile.

“You are a sad example, Slava,” she said finally. “A puddle. I hope you find what you’re looking for.”

“Vera”—he tried to hold her arms, but she recoiled—“you don’t want this.”

“So you are doing me a favor,” she expelled.

He started to speak, but she raised her hand. Go now, please.

He tried to gather his things, though nothing would move quickly, their clotheslessness grotesque. He felt her eyes on him. Eventually, she busied herself with her phone, the awkwardness like a third person.

Outside was warm and stuffy after the chillbox of Vera’s air-conditioning. Slava considered dialing Vova the cruiserweight, the admiring nod Vova would give upon pulling up at the address he knew so well, but Vera would correct the record the next time she saw Vova anyway. No, Slava wanted away from all that.

He flagged down an ordinary livery cab. Ninetieth and West End in Manhattan? The driver was incredulous at this kind of fare at this time of the night. As they bumped through the taciturn streets, Slava thought about Israel—the scratchy voice, the desert throat sending up coughs, the eyebrows leaping and waving. About his own grandfather. Where were you, old men, when your instructions were needed? But it was three a.m., the streets were empty, and there was no answer.

By now, Arianna’s night doorman knew Slava’s face, and even though he
hadn’t seen Slava in several days, his hailing from Bratislava inclined him to give Slava the benefit of the doubt, the inauspicious fate of the Czechoslovaks under the Soviet yoke notwithstanding. Which left him with a predicament now because it was three o’clock in the fucking morning, and Slavic brotherhood encountered its limits at the shoals of Western decorum.

“Ring her, ring her,” Slava said, reading his face.

The Bratislavan pressed pause on a personal video with great fanfare. “It’s late time,” he observed.

“She’s expecting me,” Slava lied.

The Slovak eyed Slava distastefully. Slava lied again, despising it: a late flight, delayed arrival, an exchange of phone calls with Arianna around midnight, she’d go to bed but leave dinner under saran wrap. It was the saran wrap, the specific detail, that got him. Otto was right about you have to mention the shoes had been yellow. If you say there are elephants flying outside your window, no one will believe you. But if you say there are six elephants flying outside your window, it’s a different story.

Bratislava made his calculations. Of course, he would rather have let Slava go up than be responsible for having woken the tenant. Slava needed to push a little bit more, he saw. “What’s your name?” he said.

“Bujnak,” the Slovak said. “Vladimir Bujnak. Vlado, you can call.”

Slava extended his hand and said his name. “I’m sorry,” he said, looking at the stairs he was about to mount. “Sorry.”

Slava stood before Arianna’s door a long time. Then he stood another long stretch after he had rung the bell. He had to ring it several times.

Finally, she called out in a worried voice. Slava told her who it was, putting a note of apology into it. He knew the Bratislavan was listening up the staircase. She opened the door wearing a T-shirt that Slava had left.

“Where have you been?” she said, her voice full of sleep. Slava only smiled dumbly. Suspicion and fear streaked her face. He tried to meet her eyes and not give way to tears. The cat, stirred from its slumber, minced curiously at her feet, skeptical and alert.

“Come to bed,” she said. She left the door open and retreated down the hallway, holding her head. Slava heard the opening of cabinets, the clinking of glasses, the glugging of alcohol into a tumbler.

Slava walked in after her, the cat watching the arc of his legs. Before Slava could close the door, it hurtled out into the hallway, and Slava had to turn around and retrieve it, the animal’s hind paws dangling helplessly in the air, disdain on its snout.

“Vodka?” she said.

“Everybody’s drinking vodka tonight,” he said.

“Oh, yeah?” she said. “Who’s everybody.” The cat rubbed its scalp against Slava’s ankle.

“Before the war,” he said, “there was a boy named Pavlik Morozov. He really took Communism to heart. His father was forging some kind of documents. So Pavlik turned in his father. Can you imagine? Guess what happened next.”

She shook her head wearily. “I have no idea, Slava.”

“They murdered the kid. The family murdered him.”

“Why are you telling me this?” She poured herself another glass, shorter this time.

“Because I can imagine myself as the person who’s forging. But I can also imagine myself as the person who turns in the forger. How can that be?”

“I don’t know, Slava,” she said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, and I’m not interested in finding out right now. Can we go to bed?”

“Her name was Vera,” he said. “The one drinking vodka tonight.”

Arianna considered him helplessly. She sank into one of the kitchen chairs, too tired to wedge her legs under the table. She covered her face with her hands and moaned. Then she opened slits between her fingers. “I wondered was it something like that,” she said. She laughed nastily. “And then I thought, no. What a cliché.”

“Nothing happened,” he said. “That’s the truth.”

“Oh, yeah?” she said, still wearing a foul expression.

“It’s not where I was all those nights.”

“Oh, yeah?” she said again. “So where were you?”

He answered her truthfully. He told her everything. From his mother’s call, and the funeral, and the funeral dinner, and what Grandfather asked, and Beau, and Vera, and Otto, and the rest, the words tumbling out without any through line. At this late moment, he couldn’t tell a good story.

She lost herself in his narrative all the same because, frankly, it was unbelievable. She forgot to remove her fingers from her face, and she sat listening this way, latticed against him. When he finished, she said, “I am actually wishing it was only that you were fucking somebody else.” Her fingers finally moved away from her face and she dislodged a hysterical laugh. “He works on the sly, this one!” She went to drink again, but her glass was empty. “I’m too tired for this,” she said, and covered her face again.

When she opened her eyes, he was on the kitchen floor, next to her legs. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“What are you apologizing to me for,” she said in a desultory way.

“To you, to you,” he said. He tried to slide into her embrace.

“Don’t,” she said, lifting her elbows away from him. He withdrew but remained sitting on the floor like a drunk. They sat without speaking, the clock ticking at them from the wall. “I am counting how many times you had to lie in the last month,” she said at last. “You might be better than anyone I’ve met. And I’ve met some talented liars.”

“I didn’t lie about this.” He gestured from her to himself.

“Somehow, I know that’s true. Remarkable. They do studies about people who won’t face the facts.”

He pulled himself up and rested his palms against the table. He waited until she was looking at him. “You are unlike anyone I’ve met,” he said. “I know you feel the same way. But often we are not happy with each other. And not because of what I just told you.” As he said it, he knew it was persuasive because it wasn’t servile. It was also the truth.

She didn’t respond.

“I would like to try,” he said. “I would like to be the kind of person who loves someone like you.”

“Just be the person who loves me,” she said. In retrospect, it would occur to him, she was merely correcting him. At the moment, however, her words sounded like reluctant forgiveness.

He lowered himself to the floor again. This time she let him rest his head on her thigh.

“What am I going to do with you,” she said, her fingers in his hair.

“I have to tell the truth,” he said, looking up at her.

She took his face in her hands. “You have to tell the truth,” she said.

T
wo days before the closing of the inaugural fall issue, Junior Staff crackled with pre-holiday anticipation, much as the Gelmans had washed windows and waxed floors on New Year’s Eve in Minsk. The issue would include the Italian story that Arianna was checking; a roundup of back-to-school items; a piece on fall styles; Peter’s piece about the press conference; a baseball piece by the dignified, sweatered man who had been doing
Century
’s baseball pieces for most of the century; and comments by Beau on the arrival of autumn.

A specially commissioned painting would appear on the cover: a pointy-nosed, ponytailed lady defying metaphysics by holding in hand the issue in question, the leaves changing outside her auto, the road ahead stretching unsubtly. The work was by Serge, one of several monomial artists used by the magazine. Serge was unable to paint unless entirely in the nude, an awkward discovery made by the magazine the previous year during a reader- appreciation watch-the-artists-paint-reproductions-of-famous-covers event.

Having dropped off the week’s “The Hoot” (66.67 percent factual) on Paul Shank’s desk, Slava felt a twitchy, unfamiliar lightness. The final claim letters had been sealed and sent off that morning from different post offices by special emissaries (Berta, who regarded the matter with more gravity than all the Jews added together, coordinated the couriers). Slava felt as if he were sending soldiers into slaughter; he had told only Arianna about Otto—though who knew whom Vera had told by now, whether out of revenge or concern. He lifted himself above the divider and watched Arianna until she noticed him.

“Get out before they find you new work,” she said.

He nodded.

“You’ll go soon, won’t you?” She meant Otto.

He promised. He reached far over the divider and ran his knuckle down her temple. She
stiffened, but then eased into his hand.

Manhattan is the imperial seat from which the various subway lines sail toward
Brooklyn like an armada. The Soviet armada is the color of yolk: The D, N, R, F, B, Q, heading to Bensonhurst, Bath Beach, Midwood, Gerritsen Beach, Mill Basin. The rest—the red 2, the green 5, the blues flirting with Queens, the browns making their excretive way across Williamsburg and Bushwick—are the trains of other countries.

The last days of August: the Sunday of summer. The Labor Day weekend was the only thing dividing the people from the full enfilade of fall sales, styles, and shopping. For the last handful of days, the mouth of American commerce—subway platforms, the flanks of buses, bus shelters, the radio—still whispered sweetly about barbecues, swimming pools, weekend getaways, and last chances.

Israel’s door was locked. No one answered the doorbell or Slava’s knocking. He thought about leaving a note, but then the gate creaked open at street level to reveal an old woman in a housedress. Slava called up to her in Russian and asked about her downstairs neighbor. Her ice-blue eyes radiated blank amusement.

“Abramson?” Slava tried. “Lives in the basement apartment. Short. Big eyebrows.” He wiggled his.

“When I moved into this neighborhood fifty years ago,” the woman said in blocky English, “there were a lot of immigrants here. Poles, like me. Germans, Irish, Italian, Hungarian, Croat, you name it. It never occurred to us that we should just speak our own language to the next person in the street.”