A REPLACEMENT LIFE E-Book

Boris Fishman

• Herausgeber: ONE
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Seitenzahl: 496

Beschreibung

A failing young Russian American journalist's life is unexpectedly transformed when he forges Holocaust restitution claims for his rogue grandfather and his friendsSlava Gelman wants to be a great writer, but can't get past his job as a lowly researcher at a New York magazine. Then his beloved grandmother dies, and his grandfather corners him with a request: to write a few Holocaust retribution claims that aren't quite true. Slava is reluctant, but when he gets into it, his semi-fictional accounts of a generation's real suffering turn out to be the best writing he has ever done - and a surprisingly wonderful way for Slava to reconnect with his family and his own roots. Although he lives in fear of discovery and continues to stumble from one tragicomic incident to another, by the time Slava is finally confronted by a German government employee he is ready to play a role that is - almost - heroic. A beautifully written, emotionally powerful literary debut about family love, memory and the truth in fiction.Boris Fishmanwas born in Minsk, Belarus, in 1979 and immigrated to the United States at the age of nine. He is the editor ofWild East: Stories from the Last Frontier, and his work has appeared in theNew Yorker,The New York Times Magazine,New Republic,Wall Street Journal,London Review of Books,New York Times Book Reviewand other publications. He lives in New York City.A Replacement Lifeis his first novel.'A Replacement Lifeis a memorable debut by a wonderfully gifted young writer... Boris Fishman has written a beautifully nuanced, tender, and often very funny novel about conscience and familial loyalty that will linger long in the memory' - Joyce Carol Oates'Is there room in American fiction for another brilliant young émigré writer? There had better be, because here he is. Boris Fishman's first novel,A REPLACEMENT LIFE, is bold, ambitious and wickedly smart... The only problem with this novel is that its covers are too close together. I wanted more' - Patricia T. O'Conner,New York Times Book Review'Astonishingly brilliant... we are left satisfyingly provoked by the book's deeper questions about culture and ethics and survival and human nature itself' -Chicago Tribune'Mordantly funny and moving' -The New York Times'So strong in voice, humor, and compassion that it transcends fiction's limitations to become something wilder and more contained - like life. What a remarkable debut - true and resonate, humorous and real' - Hilton Als'Shines with a love for language and craft' - starred review,Publishers Weekly'Fishman fearlessly tackles the grandest subjects... a writer not only to watch but envy' - Tom Bissell'A terrific talent... a gifted and accomplished writer' - Salvatore Scibona'Stunning...A Replacement Lifedeserves a wide audience' - Jim Harrison'A novel that works beautifully on many levels' - Arthur Phillips'A hell of a book. Told with amazing virtuosity, fun and serious, funny and sad, profound and eminently readable' - Darin Strauss'Suffused with elegant language and sly humor and composed with the authority of a novelist on intimate terms with both his subject matter and art form' - Teddy Wayne, author ofThe Love Song of Jonny Valentine'There's a touch of Gogol here, a touch of Babel, a touch of Dostoyevsky, but... Boris Fishman has fashioned something distinctively and triumphantly his own' - Brian Morton, author ofStarting Out in the Evening

Leseprobe

A REPLACEMENT LIFE

BORIS FISHMAN

FOR MY GR ANDPARENTS AND MY PARENTS

All writing is revenge.

— REINALDO ARENAS

Contents

Title PageDedicationEpigraph1234567891011121314151617181920AcknowledgmentsAuthor’s NoteAbout the AuthorAlso Available from OneCopyright

–1–

SUNDAY, JULY 16, 2006

The telephone rang just after five. Unconscionably, the day was already preparing to begin, a dark blue lengthening across the sky. Hadn’t the night only started? Slava’s head said so. But in the cobalt square of the window, the sun was looking for a way up, the great towers of the Upper East Side ready for gilding.

Who was misdialing at five o’clock in the morning on Sunday? Slava’s landline never rang. Even telemarketers had given up on him, you have to admit an achievement. His family no longer called because he had forbidden it. His studio, miraculously affordable even for a junior employee of a Midtown magazine, rang with echoes, nothing but a futon, a writing desk, a torchiere wrapped in cast-iron vines (forced on him by his grandfather), and a tube television he never turned on. Once in a while, he imagined vanishing into the walls, like a spirit in Poe, and chuckled bitterly.

He thought about getting up, a surprise attack on the day. Sometimes he rose extra-early to smell the air in Carl Schurz Park before the sun turned it into a queasy mixture of garbage, sunscreen, and dog shit. As the refuse trucks tweaked the slow air with their bells, he would stand at the railing, eyes closed, the river still black and menacing from the night, the brine of an old untouchable ocean in his nose. An early start always filled him with the special hope available only before seven or eight, before he got down to the office.

The phone rang again, God bless them. Defeated, he reached over. In truth, he was not ungrateful to be called on. Even if it turned out to be a telemarketer. He would have listened to a question about school bonds, listened gravely.

“Slava,” a waterlogged voice—his mother—whispered in Russian. He felt anger, then something less certain. Anger because he had said not to call. The other because generally she obeyed nowadays. “Your grandmother isn’t,” she said. She burst into tears.

Isn’t. Verbiage was missing. In Russian, you didn’t need the adjective to complete the sentence, but in English, you did. In English, she could still be alive.

“I don’t understand,” he said. He hadn’t spoken to any of them in weeks, if not a month, but in his mind, his grandmother, quiet sufferer of a cirrhosis that had been winning for years, was fixed to her bed in Midwood, as if the way he remembered her was the way she would be until he came to see her again, until he authorized new developments. Something previously well placed dislodged in his stomach.

“They took her in on Friday,” his mother said. “We thought it was only hydration again.”

He stared at the blanket around his feet. It was as frayed and fine as an old shirt. Grandmother had scoured it in the wash how many times. The Gelmans had brought it from Minsk, as if blankets were not sold in America. And they weren’t, not like this, a full goose inside. The cover opened in the middle, not on the side. A girl had gotten tangled up in there in a key moment once. “I think I need Triple A,” she said. They burst out laughing and had to start over.

“Slava?” his mother said. She was quiet and frightened. “She died alone, Slava. No one was with her.”

“Don’t do that,” he said, grateful for her irrationality. “She didn’t know.”

“I hadn’t slept the night before, so I left,” she said. “Your grandfather was supposed to go this morning. And then she died.” She started to flow again, sobs mixing with snot. “I kissed her and said, ‘I’ll see you tomorrow.’ Slava, mercy, I should have stayed.”

“She wouldn’t have known you were there,” he said in a thick voice. He felt vomit rising in his throat. The blue morning had become gray. The air conditioner chugged from the window, the humidity waiting outside like a thief.

“All by herself, she was taken.” His mother blew her nose. The receiver jostled on her end. “So,” she said with sudden savagery. “Now will you come, Slava?”

“Of course,” he said.

“Now he will come,” she said viciously. Slava’s mother held the world record for fastest trip from tender to brutal, but this tone had not entered even their arguments about his abandonment of the family. “Now is finally a good enough reason? The woman who would have skinned herself for you. The woman you saw—one time, Slava, in the last year?” She changed her voice to emphasize her indifference to his opinion: “We’re doing the funeral today. They say it has to be twenty-four hours.”

“Who says?” he said.

“I don’t know, Slava. Don’t ask me these things.”

“We’re not religious,” he said. “Are you going to bury her in a shroud, too, or whatever they do? Oh, it doesn’t matter.”

“If you come, maybe you can have a say,” she said.

“I’m coming,” he said quietly.

“Help your grandfather,” she said. “He’s got a new home attendant. Berta. From Ukraine.”

“Okay,” he said, wanting to sound helpful. His lips twitched.

His grandmother wasn’t. This possibility he hadn’t rehearsed. Why not—she had been ill for years. But he had been certain that she would pull through. She had pulled through far worse, pulled through the unimaginable, what was a bit more?

His grandmother was not a semi-annual hair-tousler. (Had not been? The new tense, a hostile ambassador, submitted its credentials.) She had raised him. Had gone into the meadow with him, punting a soccer ball until other children showed up. It was she who found him making out with Lusty Lena in the mulberry bush and she who hauled him home. (Grandfather would have rubbed his hands and given instruction, Lou Duva to Slava’s Holyfield, half-nelsoned in Lena’s formidable bust, but not for Grandmother loucheness.) When the nuclear reactor blew up, Grandmother cursed Grandfather for bothering with the radio, traded one of her minks (in fairness, acquired by Grandfather on the black market) for a neighbor’s Zhiguli, and had Slava’s father drive them all for a week to Lithuania, where the mink housed and fed them.

Slava knew her in the body. His mouth knew, from the food she shoveled there. His eyes knew, from the bloated sweep of her fingers. Grandmother had been in the Holocaust—in the Holocaust? As in the army, the circus? The grammar seemed wrong. At the Holocaust? Of it, with it, from it, until it? The English preposition, stunned by the assignment, came up short—though she said no more than that, and no one disturbed her on the subject. This Slava couldn’t fathom, even at ten years old. Already by then he had been visited by the American understanding that to know was better than not to know. She would go one day, and then no one would know. However, he didn’t dare ask. He imagined. Barking dogs, coils of barbed wire, an always gray sky.

“Goodbye, Slava,” his mother interrupted. She spoke as if she hardly knew him. The line made its noises between them. He had the sensation that only they were speaking while eight million slept. The unreality of it teased him. Heartlessly: Grandmother was gone. Grandmother wasn’t.

How long were they silent? Even while talking, they were silent with each other. Finally, in a faraway tone, his mother said: “Our first American death.”

Downstairs at the doorman station, Rich was buried in the delivery closet. Slava accelerated to reach the front door first, as he disliked mincing in place while Rich (né Ryszard, Poland), Bart (né Bartos, Hungary), or Irvin (né Ervin, Albania) shuffled toward it. Slava liked to open the door for older men, not vice versa. However, Rich, Bart, and Irvin were eager to take their place in his day, their eyes lit with resentful admiration—a fellow immigrant, risen to heights. Once, Slava had tried to persuade Rich that he had the front door, but the older man only lifted his index finger in warning.

“Slava, how evorytyng?” Rich said now from the depths of the closet. He had buffed the foyer, and Slava, a dozen feet from the door, squeaked with every step. With a dancer’s precision, the cumbersome Pole emerged from the thicket of dry cleaning and delivery boxes and slid his hand into the door handle. “Have nice day, pliz, okay?” he said with touching disdain.

Our first American death. Have nice day, pliz. As Slava strode out of the building, the day’s what-ifs again presented their tempting alternatives. Rich still got the door first, the 6 train was still inept for the crush of the Upper East Side, and Grandmother was still alive, scratching weakly at her lesions in a bathrobe in Midwood. Sure, her bile ducts were blocked, her bilirubin was high—Billy Rubin, he was a half-Jewish boy, he wouldn’t hurt her!—but she was still there, chomping her lips and glowering at Grandfather.

Since the last time Slava had come to South Brooklyn—almost a year prior; his mother could count without pity—a new residential tower had started to grow around the corner from his apartment building, two restaurants on his block had shuttered and reopened as others, and the local councilman had been forced out in a sex scandal. As the train surged above-ground at Ditmas, Slava rode past the same repair shops and convenience stores, the same music bouncing from the tinted windows of spoilered Camaros, the same corrupt councilman on the billboards (only his vice was kickbacks). These people had come to America to be left alone.

Here was a foreign city, if you were coming from Manhattan. The buildings were smaller and the people larger. They drove cars, and for most, Manhattan was a glimmering headache. As the train neared Midwood, the produce improved and the prices shook loose. Here, a date tasted like chocolate, and it was a virtue to persuade the grocer—Chinese not Korean, Mexican not Arab—to have it for less than the cardboard placards wedged into the merchandise said. This was still a world in the making. In some of its neighborhoods, the average time since arrival was under twelve months. These American toddlers were only beginning to crawl. Some, however, had already found the big thumb of American largesse.

Grandfather lived on the first floor of a tawny-bricked building tenanted by old Soviets and the Mexicans who wouldn’t let them sleep. His senior-citizen benefits didn’t permit him to make an appearance on official payrolls. To the Kegelbaums in 3D, he sold salmon picked off the wholesalers for whose deliveries he waited in front of Russian food stores. Why pay $4.99/lb inside when he could pay $3 on the sidewalk? The boys in the wholesale truck laughed and threw him free flounder and cod.

Next door to the Kegelbaums were the Rakoffs, American Jews. These were aghast by the seafood emerging from the mesh grocery bag in Grandfather’s hands. The Aronsons (Soviet, 4A) paid for the nitroglycerine that Grandfather’s doctor overprescribed in exchange for a monthly bottle of Courvoisier cognac. To the Mexicans (2A, 2B, illegal basement apartment) Grandfather gave haircuts, because they partook of neither salmon nor nitroglycerine. The churn in which these new arrivals gained body barely had time to spit out cream before it was refilled. Naturally, each batch was thinner than the one that preceded it.

Slava scaled the stairs to the first floor and stood before Grandfather’s door. On an ordinary day, you could hear his television from the ground-floor mailboxes—revenge on the basement Mexicans, who smashed tallboy Budweisers into smithereens until dawn on the weekends. Now it was soundless, on this side of the door the glory of a day just like any other.

It gave without knocking. Usually, Grandfather bolted all three locks—in this part of Brooklyn, eyes still roamed with Soviet heights of desire. But it was a day of mourning. Like Tolstoy’s villagers putting on the lights outside after dinner, he was asking for company.

Inside, a sweet glaze hung in the air, dishes clattering in the kitchen. Slava slipped off his shoes and tiptoed the length of the hallway until he could see into the living room. Grandfather was on the beige sofa, the ash-colored down of his hair in his hands. On the street, women noticed Grandfather—Italian cashmere, his hands and forearms needled with sea-colored tattoos—before they noticed the grandson holding his arm. Now the old man was in gym trousers and undershirt, looking like an old man. His toenails were testing the air, as if to make sure the world was still there.

The sofa hissed as Slava lowered himself next to Grandfather. Yevgeny Gelman removed his hands from his face and stared at his grandson as if he were unknown and it was an affront to encounter another person without the woman alongside whom he had spent half a century. Slava was the notice that a million diabolical dislocations awaited.

“Gone, your grandmother,” Grandfather whimpered, and rolled his head into the starch of Slava’s shirt. He honked out a sob, then sprang back. “It’s a nice suit,” he said.

“Mom call?” Slava said. The Russian words sounded as if said by another: nasal, arch, ungrammatical. He had spoken Russian last when he had spoken last to his mother, a month before, though he continued to swear in Russian and he continued to marvel in Russian. Ukh ty. Suka. Booltykh. These had no improvement in English.

Grandfather searched Slava’s face for adequate grasp of his heartache. “Mama’s at Grusheff ’s,” he said. “She said to call people and tell them. The Schneyersons are coming. Benya Zeltzer said he’ll try to get free. He owns three food stores.”

“Is anyone helping her?” Slava said.

“I don’t know. That rabbi, Zilberman?”

“You know Zilberman isn’t a rabbi,” Slava said.

Grandfather shrugged. Certain questions he did not ask.

Zilberman wasn’t a rabbi. As Kuvshitz wasn’t a rabbi, nor Gryanik. They loitered in the hospital waiting rooms, Soviet immigrants who had learned a little Hebrew and were conveniently present to ennoble a passing like Grandmother’s with Torah-compliant burial guidance for a small fee. And why not? Their brothers and cousins hauled furniture, drove ambulettes starting at sunrise, skim-coated walls until their fingers shredded and bled—so who was smart.

And were these men not delivering exactly what their customers wanted? Were they not, simply, in the American way, addressing a demand of the market? Their compatriots had spent too many years under Soviet atheism to observe Jewish ritual now that they were free to do so, but they wanted a taste, a holy sprinkling, a forshpeis. Enter Zilberman et al., temporarily transformed into Moshe, Chaim, Mordechai. These artists of gray zones picked from the religious guidance on Jewish burials selectively. Immediate burial, as per Jewish law—certainly. As for a plain pine coffin, rimmed by no flowers—was that really right? The deceased may not have been a millionaire or an international personage, but he or she had been an anchor of families, a sufferer of world wars, a bearer of plain wisdom. This person deserved greater than #2 pine. Grusheff Funeral Home—Valery Grushev thought the two f ’s made his name sound as if his ancestors had come with the aristocracy that had fled the Bolsheviks via France in 1917—had coffins from Belarusian birch, California redwood, even Lebanese cedar. Didn’t those who’d known the deceased deserve an opportunity to say goodbye one last time at a service? From each milestone of grief, Moshe and Chaim collected percentages.

“I’ll help call if you’d like,” Slava said to Grandfather.

“I’m almost finished,” Grandfather said. “Not that many people to call, Slava.”

In the kitchen, a pot crashed into another, interrupting the rush of the sink water. A woman cursed herself for clumsiness. Grandfather lifted his head, his eyes alert once again. “Come,” he said, his hand on Slava’s forearm. “Things change, you don’t come for so long.” Rising, he leaned on Slava’s arm with more weight than he needed.

They filled the kitchen doorway arm in arm, like a pair of lovers. The blue rims of Grandfather’s eyes welled with tears. “Berta,” he said hoarsely. “My grandson.” Death or no death, Grandfather could ingratiate himself with his new home attendant by formally introducing his grandson.

Like a Soviet high-rise, each floor of Berta was stuffed beyond capacity. Silver polish gleamed from her toes, wedged into platforms that she was using as house slippers; flower-print capri tights encased in a death grip the meat-rack haunch of her legs. Slava felt a treacherous lurch in his groin. She hadn’t heard Grandfather.

“Berta!” Grandfather barked. His arm tensed and he rapped the wall with his knuckles. Berta spun around. Underneath its creases and the worried, close set of the eyes, her face had preserved its young, unblemished beauty. A buttery gleam rose from the skin.

“The boy!” she shrieked. Holding up her long yellow dish gloves as if placating a mugger, she waddled toward Slava and enclosed him in the flab of her arms. Berta also had to make a demonstration before Grandfather. One phone call from him to the assignments coordinator at the home-nurse agency, who received from Grandfather a monthly gift of chocolates and perfume, and Berta would be reassigned to a paraplegic who needed his ass wiped and his oatmeal spoon-fed. Slav Berta, whose people had used to terrorize Jews like Grandfather! This—more than the profusion of meat in American supermarkets, the open availability of rare technology, even the cavalierness with which Americans spoke of their president—was the mysterious grandeur of the country that had taken in the Gelmans of Minsk. It had the power to turn tormentors into kitchen help.

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 Grandfather’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.

On the phone, Grandfather would want to know when Slava would come visit, but when Slava was there at last, the old man would tiptoe off to the television, Grandmother scowling at him. Then she, too, would become tired and, making apologies, shuffle off to bed, her house shoes scraping the parquet. Slava was left with the home attendant. As the day declined and Grandfather made faces at the television, they would compare notes on his grandparents.

“Slava?” Mother said now from the other side of the table. “You’re all right?” The skin under her eyes was inflamed.

“Yes,” he nodded. “Of course.”

“What are you thinking about?”

“Nothing.”

“I wonder if someone will say a toast,” she said resentfully.

Slava surveyed the table. Grandfather’s call-around had netted all the significant relatives. Uncle Pasha and Aunt Viv; the girls from the pharmacy where his mother worked; the Schneyersons; Benya Zeltzer and clan.

Even two Rudinskys. The Rudinskys held a special place in Grandfather’s catalog of wayward relations. The Gelmans and Rudinskys had come through immigration together, had been assigned to the same guesthaus in Austria, where their documents were processed, and down the block from each other in Italy, where they were processed some more. Vera Rudinsky and Slava Gelman had played supermarket together. They cut cucumbers out of green construction paper, raised a crop of goose bumps on the skin with black marker, and sold them to their parents for prices just below those of the real vegetable market on Via Tessera. Their parents and grandparents laughed, counting out lira, and when the children were gone to restock the shelves of V&S Alimenti, they made jokes about all the money their children would make in America, followed by wordless glances that said: Together? Maybe together.

Money works both ways. After arriving in America, Vera’s father had asked Grandfather for a loan to invest in a limo fleet. Grandfather didn’t like to part with money unless he could count on interest, and he couldn’t bring himself to ask that of the Rudinskys, who had shared with the Gelmans months of stateless dread amid the perverse beauty of Mitteleuropa and the Tyrrhenian seashore. The Rudinskys retreated. No scenes; they just called less and less. Grandfather refused to call until called.

However, the Rudinskys would not disrespect Grandmother’s memory. When the men went off to the secondhand market near Rome to pawn what they’d lugged from Minsk, and the women to the firsthand market to spend on provisions what the men made in the secondhand, it was Grandmother who remained with the children, walking them to the pebbly beach, where they splashed around in the bottle-green Mediterranean water. It was she who supervised the children as they distended their bellies with translucent muscat grapes that looked as if filaments of sun had lodged inside. (Grandmother did not touch the grapes. The grapes, expensive, were for the children.) It was Grandmother who tucked the children to sleep, though she didn’t read stories. She ran her fingers, the skin flimsy and loose, through their hair until they calmed down and dozed off.

All the same, to indicate displeasure, the Rudinsky high command had sent low-level envoys: Vera had come with her grandfather. The parents (Garik, taxi driver; Lyuba, bookkeeper) had claimed night shifts. It wasn’t enough for Grandfather. Slava watched the old man’s eyes roll past Vera and her grandfather Lazar, a scowl on his lips.

Slava stared at Lazar. He was stooped as a branch being reclaimed by the ground. In the town near Rome where Soviet immigrants were settled en route to America by some unknown geopolitical contract, Lazar Timofeyevich Rudinsky remained a legend years after the Rudinskys had departed for Brooklyn. The secondhand market was such that people came from Rome itself. Those who had gone through Italy before the Rudinskys and Gelmans sent word about what Italians wanted from their strange interlopers: linen sheets, Lenin pins, cologne, Zenit cameras. Also power drills, cognac, and Red Army caps. Every morning, the Soviet men shrouded themselves in Soviet linens and mongreled into the soft air of Tyrrhenian fall: “Russo producto! Russo producto!”

Lazar Timofeyevich had an idea. He made rounds of the immigrant homes, inviting the men to the little villa assigned to the Rudinskys. His wife, Ada Denisovna, walked around with wafers and tea. Vera and Slava colored in the next room—V&S Alimenti was working on a new shipment of grapefruit. After the men had finished their tea, Lazar Timofeyevich handed out Italian phrase books. Everyone would memorize—he didn’t ask, he told—basic Italian numbers. Diecimila lire, centomila lire. Whenever anyone looked like he might have a sale at the flea market, an Italian mark ready to spring for a peaked cap or a power drill, one or two of the others would walk over and trot out their new Italian as if they were other customers. Trying to compete with the Italian mark. To drive up the price. Capisce?

They stood there in a circle, ten sixty-year-old men, rolling their r’s and puckering their fingers like the Italians. Diecimila lire, centomila lire. Va fangul. What else was this fucking life going to ask them to do?

They made it happen, however. There were a couple of flops to begin with, Syoma Granovsky losing a nice scarf sale because Misha Schneyerson had become so animated that he outbid all the Italians in the crowd. But then they figured it out and everyone’s earnings increased.

Now Lazar was stooped to the waist. Slava didn’t have to ask about his wife. The homes of Soviet Brooklyn were filled with men who had been left to themselves by the last people to know how much looking after they needed. The men protected their families in a place liable to go berserk on its Jews without notice, and the women protected the men. They died first, leaving the men the most frightening leftovers: life by themselves. They were terrified of being alone. More terrified than they had been of America, more terrified than they had been of the Soviets, maybe even more terrified than they had been of the Germans.

Next to her grandfather, at the far corner of the other end of the table from Slava, far enough for her words to be lost, though the mascara with which she had burdened her eyelashes would have been visible from across the courtyard, sat Vera Rudinsky. Vera. In Russian, Faith. It was a grown person’s name, which explained why Vera had been so irritated by Slava’s childish pace cutting out paper eggplant for their supermarket. (Finally, she moved Slava to price tags and took cutting out for herself.) An adult in a child—she had been thin as a steeple, her face blue with pallor, as if life had breathed into her only once—Vera was serious, like Slava’s grandmother. Verochka, Verusha—everyone called her by diminutives as if to rub out the age from her name. Ve-ra: the lips shy, then exhaling in wonder. Vera—a wife’s name.

But Slava could not find that girl in the person who sat across from him, his first sighting in a decade. Little Vera Rudinsky, studious stork, had been replaced by a bronco with long nails and wild hair, the eyes of a hunter for a husband in the Russian classifieds (as Mama looked over her shoulder), though underneath the thick layer of blush on her face, Slava could still make out the unexpectedly felicitous result of Garik and Lyuba Rudinsky, two penguins, mixing genes on some Crimean beach a quarter century earlier.

Slava closed his eyes. The area behind his chest noised like a beehive. He wanted to go home. He would curl into the blanket and this terrible day would come to an end. And tomorrow, when his story about the explorer came up for judging, maybe there would be good news. He opened his eyes and saw Vera again. Her transformation was so macabre that he could not take his eyes from her.

Grandfather rose, a small glass in his hand. A moment passed before everyone noticed. Berta burned holes in the foreheads of three Slav neighbors from the floor. The Jews are having a funeral, and you morons are hollering like degenerates. Probably Grandfather had thought it rude not to invite them.

Finally, the table grew quiet. Televisions from the neighboring apartments howled through the cardboard walls, the wailing heroine of a telenovela mixing with some kind of program about the Russian civil war. “In the name of the Revolution,” a wintry voice said, “I am seizing this train.”

“Some of you may know,” Grandfather said, “twenty-five years ago by now, we were in a car accident. A blue day, blue as … I don’t know.” He pointed weakly at Uncle Pasha’s blazer, a bruised blue with white stripes. Grandfather’s free hand moved around the tablecloth, looking for invisible crumbs. “This was in Crimea. She lost a lot of blood, so they gave her a transfusion. Bad blood, as it turned out. Everything that came out of there was bad. It was a ticking bomb you don’t know it’s inside you. Cirrhosis. Well, at least she managed to make it out of there. But, what, it’s better that her headstone is in a language she didn’t know?”

Berta laid a puffy hand on Grandfather’s wrist. “I know,” he said. “I know. And look—she spoke English. She did. When we had to study for the citizenship …” He turned to Slava. “Slavchik, tell it.”

A table of eyes and half-turned bodies regarded Slava with practiced amusement. He had told this story before. He nodded. “To become a citizen,” he said. He coughed and straightened. He was going to try. “You have to agree to defend the country. No matter your age. It’s called: ‘bearing arms.’”

People nodded, smiled cautiously.

“I was thirteen or fourteen,” he went on. He sneaked a glance at Vera. She observed him dutifully but gave no sign of seeing anything other than another table loaded with smoked salmon, fried potatoes, and brightly colored bottles, another meaningless feast, though she would attend them to the last of her days without objection. Slava cursed himself. Vera also he had expected to remain as she was when he left her? He ridiculed his naïveté. Then inspected the lurid creation across the table once more, setting up the small laugh at the end of his story with her in mind. “But I had the best English, so I practiced with her for the interview. ‘Grandmother, will you bear arms for the United States of America?’ She’d make a fist, pump it in the air like Lenin, and shout ‘Yes!’”

The table broke into careful laughter. Grandfather nodded, permitting amusement, and some people hooted. These were the stories Slava would tell until his own grave—the “bearing arms” story, the story of Lusty Lena and the mulberry bush. This would be the total of Grandmother, as far as her offspring knew.

“She was better than all of us,” Grandfather said, cutting through the noise.

“Hear, hear.”

“The new generation continues our work,” Benya Zeltzer said, repeating an old Soviet slogan. Eyes turned to Slava, to Benya’s hopefully named grandson Jack.

“What we have been through, may they never,” Benya’s wife said. Arms extended with cognac thimbles, though no one touched rims. Clinking was for celebrations.

“But remember.”

“But remember, yes.”

“You know the expression,” Uncle Pasha said, winking at Slava. “The best way to remember is to start a new generation.”

Someone whistled. Eyes returned to the young people, marooned in their obviousness. Jack Zeltzer was, what—seventeen? An apron of fuzz hung over his lip.

Mercifully, the table dissolved in conversation. Uncle Pasha waddled out of his chair and dug his meat-pie hands into Slava’s shoulders. Slava felt the enormous globe of Pasha’s belly at his back. Pasha had the girth of a bureau, but he wore a silk shirt underneath a nice Italian blazer.

“Slavchik!” He crumpled Slava’s jacket like a piece of looseleaf. The scent of cognac encircled Slava again. Pasha ran a limousine for Lame Iosif and drew from a camouflaged flask of Metaxa throughout the day.

“Look at you, Slavchik,” Pasha whispered into Slava’s ear, sweat from his upper lip touching Slava’s earlobe. “Shoulders like a boar. The girls jump for you? I bet they jump for you. We don’t need to have the prezervativ conversation, correct? Man or not, too young to be a father.”

Slava rolled his eyes. “Everything’s in order, Uncle Pasha.”

Uncle Pasha was Slava’s mother’s second cousin. Pasha drove a large car, tipped well, and wouldn’t let up until he had given attention to every unpartnered woman on a dance floor. Aunt Viv only approved. Smoke machines belching cold mist, strobe lights raiding the dance platform, a heavyset peacock in magenta lipstick belting out hity on the stage (“Yellow, yellow roses! You are mine forever! Yellow, yellow roses!”), and Uncle Pasha doing the elliptical: the guarantees of an evening at Odessa or Volga or Krym, the restaurants where they all got together for birthdays, the last reason they got together with the exception of death.

“That’s what I like to hear,” Pasha said. “Your aunt and I, we could have waited a little bit.” He pointed a fat finger at Aunt Viv, bulking in swaths of black crinoline decorated with daisies. Her name was Vika—Victoria—but in America, after seeing Caesar and Cleopatra with Vivien Leigh, she had decided that Viv was more glamorous.

“Maybe she’s no beauty queen now,” Pasha said, “but when she was young? People turned. Not only men. Women. That’s the highest compliment, by the way, when the women notice. Hair like a fire alarm. Used to be, used to be.”

Slava nodded politely.

“What I’m saying is?” Pasha said. “Tfoo, you come to say one thing …” His jowls jiggled and he scratched at his chin, releasing a belch. “What I’m saying is: Over there you couldn’t work like a normal person.” He pointed at the black window and, beyond it, their former life. “There was no work. They had five people doing one job. Why work? ‘Get yourself noticed, get yourself problems,’ as we used to say. But what we have here is normal? I think America’s next big invention will be how to live without sleep. I am in the limousine five A.M. to nine P.M., and I am not the biggest earner. Your grandfather is always asking me why I don’t come visit. I am in that goddamn car! You think I was this fat back home? I was disc-throwing champion at my high school. Sometimes I ask myself, nu, Pasha, how is the trade? That for this? After all, you know?

“But look here. When I come home, I see that woman.” A big, hairy thumb pointed to Aunt Viv. She inspected them from the sides of her eyes. Belatedly, Slava realized that it was her lathering that had sent Uncle Pasha into action. “And she sets everything straight. Out there”—now it was America outside the window—“it’s someone else’s. But with her? I’d go into a foxhole with her. She’s one of us. You follow?” The sausage fingers rested inside the black waves of Slava’s hair. “You know what I’m talking about, Slava.” One of Uncle Pasha’s thumbs pivoted inside Slava’s shoulder blade until Slava was staring at Vera. “You’re off taking care of a man’s business, I understand. You think I liked listening to my mother? I went into the Red Army half to get out of that house. Six o’clock in the morning, she’d pull the covers off me. One morning, God bless her, she emptied a vase over my head. But you know what happened when I got into the army? Six in the morning would have been a gift from the skies. How about four-thirty in the morning? And they don’t pour water on you if you stay in bed; they break your legs, especially if you’re a little Yid with a big nose. They’ll take any excuse to give you something to remember them by. I missed my mother a lot in the army. You don’t know what you have until you’ve given it up, like a young idiot. Don’t be an idiot, Slava.”

Slava didn’t say anything. You just had to let the pitch run its course. Uncle Pasha held Slava’s shoulders like a rudder. They gazed emptily at the strange horizon before them.

“I have to go to the bathroom,” Slava lied.

“Slava, Slava,” Pasha sighed. He nodded and kissed his nephew with big blue lips. Then he slapped Slava’s shoulders and walked back to Aunt Viv, the army of love in retreat.

Slava rose and ducked into the kitchen. He opened the faucet so it looked like he was doing something and watched the water come down, a solid, unwavering cylinder. With a tick of irritation, he noticed another body enter the room.

“I haven’t seen you in forever,” Vera said in an English swollen by both Russia and Brooklyn.

Slava looked up at her with a wild, dumb expression. “You remember me,” he said.

“How do you mean?” she said, confused. “You look the same.”

“You, too,” he rushed to lie.

She had a round face with long, lined eyelashes, and her black skirt was tighter than you would find in a funeral etiquette book. Slava could see the unstarved ball of her knee behind black panty hose. He felt a warm liquid slosh in his stomach.

“Your grandmother—” she started to say, then the tips of her nails flew up to cover her mouth, and a second later, she burst into tears. A second after that, she was weeping into Slava’s shoulder, a shudder with each sob. Her palms pressed his shoulder blades, her breasts pressed his chest, and her tears dripped into the shoulder seam of his dress shirt. Frantic, he arched out his ass to put some distance between his groin and her groin.

She pulled away. “I got mascara all over your shirt,” she said, laughing through the tears. He reached to brush it off, but her fingers closed over his. “No, no,” she said. The cubes of her heels clicked past him. She leaned into the fridge, giving him an uncensored view of her rear end, and withdrew a bottle of seltzer, whereupon she began to dab his shoulder with a paper towel soaked in bubbles. His hard-on retreated.

“I must look like hell,” she said, and blew her nose into the bubbly paper towel.

“N-no,” he mustered.

“She’s in heaven now,” she said through phlegm.

“Do we have a heaven?” he said. He saw a celestial elevator physically hoisting the deceased.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “Do I have—” She pointed at her eyes.

“No, it’s fine,” he said. She was an expert dabber.

“Hey, you still speak-a Italiano?” she said.

The words, long unused, floated up like a dog. “Dove la fermata dell’ autobus? ” he said. She started to laugh, but it made her cry again. “I went there last year,” she said when she recovered. “On vacation.”

“To Ladispoli?” he asked. He had come to think of it as a place that had ceased to exist after the Gelmans departed.

“No. Firenze, Venezia. It was pretty. Personally, though? You could fly to Vegas for, like, half the money and half the time.”

“Vegas?” he said.

“The Bellagio?” she said. “The Venetian? I mean, it’s like a guy in one of those boats, and he’s pushing you, and he can sing if you pay him. Exactly like in Venice. In Italian or English, whichever language you prefer. Why do you need Venice? It stinks there, by the way.”

“I see,” he said.

“I get a little crazy when I go to Vegas,” she said, dabbing again at the corners of her eyes. “Hella fun. You go?”

Recently, Slava had fished out of the Las Vegas Sun an item for “The Hoot,” the humor column that was his official responsibility at Century, but he didn’t think he could explain all that to Vera. He shook his head.

“You got to go,” she summed up. “I have to go clean up, I can’t stand in front of you like this. But listen: You have to come over.”

He blinked. “Why?”

“This fight they’re having?” She pointed at the living room. “It’s crazy. How many years now?”

“So how come you came tonight?” Slava said.

“Because my grandpa said he’s going, he don’t give a bleep what my mom says. So she said I have to go with him, because it looks bad if he goes alone, like nobody loves him. But she said not to talk to anyone. Be, like, quiet and pissed off. It’s nice to see you, though, Slava.”

“It’s nice to see you, too,” he said.

“The children have to fix it, like always. You come over for dinner, and little by little. You know?”

“I don’t know,” he said carefully. “It’s their business.” He didn’t want to get involved with their argument. But with Vera?

She shrugged. “There’s not many of us here. We have to stick together.”

She stepped forward and placed her lips, full and soft, on his cheek. He felt the rasp of his cheeks prick whatever she had applied to her own. When she pulled back, the beige powder scattered finely between them. Then she walked out of the kitchen.

When he heard the bathroom door close, he wandered into the hallway separating it from the kitchen and stood there, not eavesdropping. She was humming. Then she flushed and the water slithered down the pipes. He sprang back just before the door opened. Her face had returned to its prior immobility. She winked at him and walked past.

The bathroom swam with the subtle sugar of Vera’s perfume. Berta had lined the wall with guest towels, hers and Grandfather’s concealed from foreign hands. Slava looked at the mirror. How many times had Grandmother’s withered face appeared in the exact spot where he now held his own? Slava knew that mirrors were covered after a Jewish death to prevent vanity. But what kind of mourning was it if you had to trick yourself into it? And was it so wrong to leave the mirror uncovered if it made Slava think of her? Wasn’t that the point? He lifted a towel from one of the hooks and slipped it over the mirror, fastening its edges with two containers of Berta’s face cream. He waited for this to have some effect, but he didn’t feel anything. He flushed the toilet in case someone was waiting. Despite himself, he hoped to find Vera standing outside the bathroom.

Instead, he found Grandfather, looking lost. “Slavchik,” Grandfather said drowsily. His hands hung at his sides like a soldier’s, only that his shoulders sagged.

“People are leaving?” Slava said.

“No, no,” Grandfather said.

“You got lucky with Berta,” Slava said.