A Replacement Life Read online

  Berta held Slava like the flaps of a coat in winter, a hard-on developing inside his slacks. On the stovetop, a pan sizzled with butter and onions. That was the sweetness in the air. The after-funeral table would stagger with food. The guests had to see: This house did not lack for provisions.

  As Slava embraced in Grandmother’s kitchen a woman he’d never met with an intimacy neither of them felt, the feeling he had begun to remember for Grandmother receded, like someone gently tiptoeing out of the wrong room. At the funeral service, he would be accused of indifference while Mother and Grandfather clutched each other and wailed. The guests had to see.

  It had taken two years of failing to get published by Century magazine to piece together the facts. Our great realizations are slow dishes, but once they’re ready, they announce themselves as suddenly as an oven timer. Grandfather had helped. Slava was visiting one rainy evening. Dinner had been finished, the dishes had been cleared by the home nurse, the conversation had dwindled. Grandmother was resting. Grandfather sat sideways in one of the dining room chairs, his palm on his forehead. Slava watched him from the folds of a love seat. His mind drifted to the next day’s chores, to the story idea on deck.

  Grandfather opened his palm as if making a point to someone else in the room, and said, “What, is it too late for him to become a businessman? It’s not too late. Not late at all.” He flicked his wrist. Not late at all.

  To be around Grandfather, Grandfather’s neighbors, the whole accursed neighborhood of Russians, Belarusians, Ukrainians, Moldovans, Georgians, and Uzbeks—Slava should do it if he wanted to write for a Russian newspaper, of which there were many now in the neighborhood. If he wanted to live among those who said “we don’t go to America,” except for the DMV and Brodvei. If he wanted to shop at marts that sold birch-leafed switches to whip yourself in the steam bath and rare Turkish shampoos that reversed baldness, but not Century. If he wanted to have his arm gently broken by an ex-paratrooper so he could claim it happened on ice outside Key Food and get disability. If he wanted to go out with Sveta Beyn, practitioner of high finance, who had just bought a nine-hundred-square-foot apartment, with balcony. Bought. (In truth, it had been bought by her parents, who took the liberty of decorating as well—lacquer, rococo, pictures of Mama and Papa.)

  But if Slava wished to become an American, to strip from his writing the pollution that refilled it every time he returned to the swamp broth of Soviet Brooklyn, if Slava Gelman—immigrant, baby barbarian, the forking road spread-eagled before him—wished to write for Century, he would have to get away. Dialyze himself, like Grandmother’s kidneys.

  He stopped visiting, stopped calling, left someone else to pass the nights by Grandmother’s gurney as the machines cleaned her liver. It wasn’t like she could tell, most of the time. In his Manhattan exile, which failed to supply the publication he had expected immediately, Slava would think about her. With his fork over a plate of kasha; staring at the river that separated Manhattan from Queens; as he drifted to sleep.

  This was the price of weathering the divide between there and here, he told himself. The facts were old, tiresome, well known: This immigrant changed his name on the way to success in America. This one abandoned his religion. And this one temporarily parted from his family, big crisis. Slava wasn’t leaving to study the human condition from a shack in the woods. He was going to Century—legendary, secretive Century, older than The New Yorker and, despite a recent decline, forever a paragon. No, Slava wasn’t being paid what Igor Kraz was paid for proctology, but he wasn’t palming shit-slathered tubes all day long, either. Century had published the first report from Budapest in 1956. It had been the first to take the abstract expressionists seriously. It had nailed Ivan Boesky and saved Van Cortlandt Park. This had meant nothing to any Gelman—all right. (It was the Honda of American magazines, he had tried to explain, the Versace, the Sony.) But educated, discerning people the whole country over—three million of them, the last count had come down from Subscriptions—regarded Century as Slava’s mother regarded the English queen: with awe, piety, and savage curiosity. Slava wasn’t writing there, but the Gelmans didn’t need to know that; they never bought the magazine anyway. On the sly, Slava would become a writer for Century—success was success, was it not, even if you subbed literature for proctology; he had hardly planned it this way—and then they would see. There was cost, but there would be reward.

  Two days before his grandmother died, a stroke of dumb luck—it wasn’t dumb luck, it was Arianna Bock in the next cubicle sprinkling her fairy dust—had assigned him an article for Century after he had spent three years uselessly trying to achieve same on his own. He had spent Grandmother’s last day on earth watching an “urban explorer” climb up the Ulysses S. Grant tomb in Morningside Heights. It was a sodden gimmick—everyone in this impossible city had their thing, and this was this man’s—but Slava had teased from the moment a grand essay about politics, continents, love. It was why he had awakened so poorly on Sunday—he had been writing it most of Saturday night while she—knowingly? unknowingly?—marked her last hours. There were no guarantees, but a byline in Century? Only a byline in The New Yorker meant as much. Entire book contracts were given out on the basis of a byline in Century. It was finally happening. Only he hadn’t made it in time.

  Grusheff Funeral Home occupied half a block of Ocean Parkway, the Grusheff name covering the two outfacing sides of the building. The wide avenue slumbered in the noonday heat, the few passing cars moving without any real desire. The poles of the covered entry were gilded, and the oval windows were frosted with mermaids.

  Inside, the hallway to the viewing area, carpeted in a disco mix of abstract zigzags and dashes, was lined with human-height flora, birds of paradise and hot-pink anemones sutured into vertical displays that gave the room the feel of a science fair. Valery Grusheff, cuff links and a pocket square, shuttled among the gathering mourners.

  These looked made up for a scene ten years later—dumplings swam under their eyes and tires circled their waists. Grandfather, looking deranged but credibly in grief in an overcoat despite the stifling weather, stood off in the corner cursing them under his breath. In the Soviet Union—where his officially paltry position as a barber at the main train terminal actually left him at the welcome gate of all the commerce that streamed into Minsk on the overnight trains from Moscow, Kishinev, and Yerevan—he had obtained for these people watermelons, cognac, wall units, visas. When the need arose, they had found his phone number easily. But democratic America had empowered them to secure their own watermelons and doctors’ appointments. Now he always had to call such-and-such person first, only to be invited for leftovers the day after a party to which he had not been invited. He was not counting, but where was their gratitude? They would never see his ass in their chairs again.

  The individuals in question greeted Slava’s mother with the exaggerated intimacy of people who had not seen her in years.

  “She is in the skies.”—“Be strong for your father.”—“It’s easier for her now.”—“Be strong for your son.”

  On a metal folding chair in a corner, Slava’s father pulled at the collar of his shirt, looking as unclaimed as a child in front of a school at dusk. He was present but unnoticeable, his favorite setting. He hadn’t even objected when Slava had been given the last name of Grandfather’s line instead of his own.

  “Yevgeny Isakovich,” a man called out to Grandfather. The summoned looked up and nodded ponderously, grateful to be pulled away from the stream of condolences. His eyes went searching the room. Somehow, Slava knew they were searching for him. When they found him, Grandfather tweaked his eyebrows. As Slava approached, Grandfather extended his arm, and Slava took it.

  “My condolences, from the bottom,” the man said to Grandfather, covering his heart with his palm. He wore a leather jacket, the lined face of a bricklayer cinched by a short ponytail. A tiny gold hoop roosted in one of the ears. He reached out a grate of hairy knuckles and collected Grand
father’s limp palm.

  “Thank you, Rudik, thanks,” Grandfather said.

  “Are you looking?” the man said.

  “Yes, yes,” Grandfather said. “We need.”

  “Step into the office?”

  “This is my grandson,” Grandfather said, turning to Slava.

  “Rudolf Kozlovich.” The man extended his hand. “What do you—”

  “He’s studying, still,” Grandfather said. “At Harvard.”

  In the office, Kozlovich unfurled a bluish map of Lincoln Cemetery. It was a small city with avenues and streets named after trees—Walnut, Maple, Ash. A wide thoroughfare ran through the middle, the train thundering above.

  “Nothing by the fence,” Grandfather said.

  “They’ve got synthetic lawn on it now,” Kozlovich said. “Like that stuff they put on the soccer field. You can’t see in.”

  “Nothing by the fence,” Grandfather repeated.

  Kozlovich’s finger traced a line to the other half of the grounds. “The head office is on this side.”

  “That means what?”

  “The grounds crew checks in there. More people around. Downside is—not too far from the train, either.”

  “Where is the quietest?”

  “Quiet’s over here.” Kozlovich slid his finger across hundreds of graves. “They’re building new condominiums on that side, but that’s practically over. Tulip Lane.”

  “She loved tulips,” Grandfather said.

  Kozlovich opened his hands. “Meant to be.”

  Rudolf Kozlovich was known. He had come from Odessa in 1977 or 1978. He looked around and settled on a plan. One day he and some hired boys hijacked a truck of Macy’s furs. Sable, mink, fox. They returned them one by one at the branch stores, just a lot of husbands coming back with unsuccessful gifts. They were done, over a hundred thousand dollars between them, before the store could piece together what had happened. With his one hundred thousand, Rudolf purchased one hundred choice plots at the cemetery under the el.

  There he was at the hospital, at the funeral home. He had an information network—oncologists, nurses, funeral-home directors—that Macy’s security could only envy. Kozlovich’s business was unofficial, of course, spread among different owners who collected small percentages for the use of their names in the contracts, and the cemetery continued to own some of the plots. But Kozlovich’s were the rarest, and as fewer of them remained, the prices went up.

  Kozlovich was on a clock, too. His son Vlad had come out of the closet, renounced his father’s money, and moved with his homosexual partner to Madrid. There, Vlad had reconsidered and agreed to live off Papa’s funds, which Rudolf supplied without objection—when it came to children, his wolfhound instincts went flaccid. But there was no question of Vlad returning to assume any part of his father’s burial empire, and Rudolf’s ex-wife, the former Tatiana Kozlovich, had absconded to Westchester with a derivatives trader who made her former husband seem like a wage worker. Rudolf was alone.

  “I want two,” Grandfather said now.

  “Yevgeny Isakovich.” Kozlovich’s eyebrows rose. “A plot in advance? You’re tempting fate.”

  “Well, that’s what I want,” Grandfather said.

  “All right, but I have only four of those left. One family plot and four doubles. The rest is all singles.”

  “So give me one of the doubles.”

  “Happily. Twenty thousand.”

  “Fifteen,” Grandfather said. “I’m buying two in one go.”

  “Yevgeny Isakovich,” Kozlovich frowned. “I’m sorry for your loss. But you know I don’t bargain.”

  “Fifteen and—your son is in Europe?”

  Kozlovich’s face changed expression. “Connection?” he said impatiently.

  “Exactly, Rudik,” Grandfather said, his index finger rising tutorially into the refrigerated air of the office. “Connection. Why are we here? For them.” He poked a nail into Slava’s chest. “If this one said, ‘I want Europe,’ I would build the airplane myself. That’s the kind of grandfather I am. But you miss your boy? Exactly. So I am making you an offer. A special kind of telephone. You pick up the receiver and it’s already ringing in Paris.”

  “Madrid.”

  “Wherever. A special connection just for you and your son. These things, probably the only one who’s got one is Bush. And not that money is an issue for a person such as yourself, but: no charge.”

  “A walkie-talkie,” Kozlovich said. “With international range.”

  “Exactly. The newest thing.”

  “And where did you get such a thing?”

  “Rudik,” Grandfather said. Briefly, the sear of grief was gone from his face. His eyes gleamed. “A girl doesn’t tell who she’s kissed. It’s authentic, that’s all you need to know. The Japanese navy uses it, or something like that.”

  When the Gelmans reached the United States, Grandfather had found a “warm” fellow who knew where the trucks from Crazy Eddie’s unloaded. The models of the electronics Grandfather obtained—microwaves, dishwashers, floppy disks—were so new and advanced that no one in the family could understand how to use them. Grandfather screamed into his Pentagon-caliber cordless as if it were a can connected to Slava’s wall by a string. But he could obtain a Japanese navy international-range walkie-talkie in the time it took Slava to find a newspaper.

  Kozlovich peered at him. “I have one double left on Tulip,” he said finally.

  Grandfather spread his hands. “Meant to be.” From the pocket of his overcoat, which now revealed its purpose, he extracted a Tupperware encasing a snail of hundred-dollar bills. Whispering under their breath, the three mourners counted to 150—once, again, and a third time. Grandfather had not brought a bill more.

  When they emerged from the office, Grandfather threaded his arm through Slava’s and spat. “Homos. If you’re going to Europe already, who goes to Madrid?” He looked as if he’d swallowed spoiled milk. “Paris, Slava. Don’t be a discount aristocrat. Let’s walk.”

  –2–

  The funeral service was conducted by a Borsalino-hatted, bearded whisperer in Orthodox garb who remarked unspecifically, but in Russian and with key references to sections of the Torah that no one in the audience had read, on the passage of Grandmother’s life.

  Against the rabbi’s gentle reproaches—“We Jews try to remember the person as living,” he murmured apologetically into his cuff—the coffin had been left open. In it, Grandmother looked unpersuaded of death. Dressed in a long blue nightshirt, her face diplomatic and cautious, she looked as if snoring politely through an afternoon nap. At the rim of the coffin, Slava stifled back tears, the line of mourners humming behind him. Then Uncle Pasha was at his ear, followed by the sweetish scent of used cognac. “You need to keep it together for the sake of the women,” Pasha whispered with sympathetic reproach.

  When it was her turn, Slava’s mother fainted. Fixed to his seat, Slava watched several men lift her from the ground. A female guest he didn’t know—feathered mauve hat, a veil falling from the brim—waved a bottle of salts, and she revived with a gasp.

  Afterward, by themselves in the car, his father mute behind the wheel and Grandfather staring wetly at the broad emptiness of Ocean Parkway, Mother turned from the front passenger seat and, as if sighting Slava for the first time that day, colored. She’d had to handle by herself both these men, one petulant and the other mute, and he thought he could just appear? Her eyes blazed; she looked as if she wanted to strike him. He wished she would. Instead, a gust of something corrective swept her face clean, and again she looked loving. She lunged toward Slava and began to wail into his shoulder from the front seat, two souls bereaved but together.

  Mother had taken from Grandmother the condiments without the meal. She clung to Slava but knew not why and did not ask. Grandmother clung because her previous family had been taken without asking. This one she would hold to faster than iron—with this one, she would make sure to die first, in the natural order. (“
It is a blessing to die in the natural order.”—Sofia Gelman.) The mother clung because the grandmother clung. When Slava stopped showing up, it was only his mother who dialed from New Jersey, badgering and pleading. Grandmother couldn’t, Grandfather was too proud, and Slava’s father had been made docile by his parents-in-law, though he kicked the television once because why did these people control their lives.

  At the cemetery, each of the remaining Gelmans shoveled a spadeful of dirt onto the grave, the rabbi chanting a selection in Hebrew that concluded with Grandfather slipping him a white envelope, whereupon God’s messenger vanished into the blurry heat of the evening. The Gelmans stood in front of the pit in a suddenly terrible silence split only by the distant rush of an airplane nosing its way through the atmosphere. Mother and Grandfather grasped each other, two shipwrecks on an island. Slava and his father bracketed them without words.

  Berta conveyed her condolences the only way that she could. Two foldout tables in Grandfather’s living room heaved with plates rimmed in gold filigree: duck with prunes; pickled watermelon; potato pancakes with dill, garlic, and farmer cheese. A dropped fork or a glass emptied of Berta’s trademark cranberry water sent her bulleting into the kitchen with startling litheness. The table droned with the sound of grief mixed with fatigue.

  “A woman like her you don’t meet nowadays. Fierce as a—”

  “Berta, this soup . . .”

  “. . . but mark my words, there wasn’t a false bone—”

  Slava used to sit at one of these tables once a week, the cooking by a Berta or a Marina or a Tatiana, uniformly ambrosial, as if they all attended the same Soviet Culinary School No. 1. Stout women, preparing to grow outward even if they hadn’t reached thirty, in tights decorated with polka dots or rainbow splotches, the breasts falling from their sailor shirts, their shirts studded with rhinestones, their shirts that said Gabbana & Dulce.

  Stewed eggplant; chicken steaks in egg batter; marinated peppers with buckwheat honey; herring under potatoes, beets, carrots, and mayonnaise; bow-tie pasta with kasha, caramelized onions, and garlic; ponchiki with mixed-fruit preserves; pickled cabbage; pickled eggplant; meat in aspic; beet salad with garlic and mayonnaise; kidney beans with walnuts; kharcho and solyanka; fried cauliflower; whitefish under stewed carrots; salmon soup; kidney beans with the walnuts swapped out for caramelized onions; sour cabbage with beef; pea soup with corn; vermicelli and fried onions.