He thought about it. “She was sick for six years. She was in a car accident and the blood transfusion was bad. She got cirrhosis from it. Her liver didn’t want to work. All the toxins the liver throws out — they stayed inside. Half the time, she was out of it. Her skin was covered with splotches. They itched her like crazy, she would just about rip the skin off. She had to go to the hospital for hydration all the time. Every other month, then every month, then every week. And through all of this, she didn’t complain. You asked her how she was, and she said, ‘Very good.’ She said it in English, those were the two words she knew, and she said it that way so it could be a joke and you’d laugh and it would take attention away from her. What kind of a person is that?” He looked up at Arianna. “Meanwhile, if my grandfather thinks you’ve forgotten about him for a minute, he’ll remind you. He’s the one who talks. So I know him. I don’t know her. I would like to. I would have liked to.”
She didn’t say anything, only rested a palm on his chest. He was grateful to her for not saying anything.
“So what do I have to do now?” he said. “After covering the mirror.”
“You don’t have to do anything,” she said.
“But there are rules,” he said.
She smiled. “There are rules, yes. You mourn for seven days. Which you would be on the tail end of. You sit on low stools.”
“Why?”
“So you aren’t comfortable,” she said.
“So you remember the person.”
“Yes. People bring food so you don’t have to cook. Company, to get you through the worst time.”
“It’s pride to think about it directly?”
“No, I think that would be a Christian problem,” she said. “It’s just painful. In yeshiva, I had a teacher who said, ‘Judaism asks you to be more than yourself and gives you help when you can’t be.’ That’s how I want to live. That’s a merciful God.”
“I thought he was an angry God,” Slava said.
“He’s there, too,” she laughed. “In the form of my mother. But you really don’t have to take all of it. You drown in it and you want to run away completely.”
“That happened to you?” he said.
“No, but I can imagine it,” she said. She ran her hand inside his shirt.
“This heat is demented,” he said.
“August,” she said. “You’re an erotic hallucination.”
“One of yours?”
“I wish.”
A lone trumpeter tooted into a microphone on the stage at the western end of the park. There was going to be a concert later in the day.
“Do you try to publish them?” he said.
She shook her head. “It’s for me.”
“Maybe you’re just shy,” he said.
“Maybe you’re an exhibitionist.”
“Do you know what you want to do?”
“Fact-checking not a persuasive career?” she said. “I don’t know yet. I’m waiting for a sign. I envy you — you know exactly what you want.”
“It’s brought great triumph.”
“You’re not patient.”
“Can you tell me about fact-checking?” he said cautiously.
“Sure,” she said. “What do you want to know?”
He shrugged. “Anything. I’ve been sitting next to you a year and a half — I’ve been sleeping in your bed for a week — and I don’t know the first thing about it.”
“Will you sleep in it this weekend?” she said.
“Depends how well you answer my questions.”
She laughed, the white blocks of her teeth gleaming in the sun. “Fact-checking?” she said, leaning back on her palms. “I don’t know. You check the facts in the story.” She shrugged.
“The piece you’re checking now.”
“A missing painting at a museum in Italy. But you can’t reach anyone half the time because of their farkakte siestas. Also, ask me if I speak Italian. And Sheila, God bless her, doesn’t remember the curator’s name. But she’s embarrassed to hand in incomplete copy, so she makes it up. Instead of leaving it blank, she makes up the curator’s name. Oh, Arianna will find it. Ask me how many hours I spent this morning hunting down Massimo the False Curator.”
“But how does it work, you know?” he said. “Like, what sends up… a red flag?”
“A red flag,” she repeated. “Well, they write the story. Or let’s say they report a story. For instance, last week: Lehman Brothers. Company of the decade, blah blah. Simons reports the story. I have to go through the entire thing and underline everything that seems like it could be a fact. And then check it.”
“But what counts as a fact?”
“A fact? Mr. Grayson would kill me if he heard me saying this out loud, but — a fact is anything that can piss somebody off by being wrong. That’s why stories about a murder in the forgotten tribe of Waka-waka on the lost island of Wango-dango are actually the easiest check, in a way. Those people don’t read Century. They don’t care if you counted wrong how many stripes of cow dung they have on their faces.”
“But is there anything you don’t need to check?”
“Personal impressions. Conjecture. Things that can’t be checked can’t be wrong, you know? If there’s no record, it can’t be checked. I’m sorry—why are you so interested in this?” He couldn’t see her face, but he knew its expression, the way her eyes grew narrow when she was skeptical.
“I’m interested in you,” Slava said quickly, and leaned up to kiss her.
7
FRIDAY, JULY 28, 2006
Israel lived in a grotto-like basement apartment on Quentin Road, across from a Russian grocery and near a squat outer-borough edition of the public library. The living room was through a galley kitchen sheeted with the usual gloomy linoleum. Mailbox-sized packs of saltines and tuna-can skyscrapers peered from dusty cupboards — complimentary provisions from the local synagogue. The same dreck piled in Grandfather’s cabinets, only his home nurses made Ukrainian magic from it. On Israel’s wall was a pharmacy calendar, a bottle of Lipitor reclining suggestively in place of a supermodel. There were four identical calendars from other Russian pharmacies neatly stacked underneath, as if Israel were going to do the year over.
“My small castle,” Israel said, spreading his arms and stepping into the living room. It was a line from an old Soviet film about a man who returned home to the wrong apartment because the concrete apartment blocks all looked the same, and fell in love with the woman who lived there. Israel was short and round, a pair of dark blue gym trousers keeping the basketball of his belly in place. His face was as seamed as a topographical map, the curved headland of a nose holding the landscape together. It bucked slightly when Slava introduced himself.
Slava had ignored Israel for a week. His original plan was to ignore him forever. But the week after his call, instead of combing the Charlotte Observer and the East Hampton Patch, Slava invented three flubs and went to search for his grandmother in the Belarus forest. The night that Arianna had fallen asleep in his bed, his grandmother had come to him. A mercilessly brief visitation, but for forty-five minutes, time had stopped so that he could enter a void and talk with the old woman. As long as he kept writing about Grandmother, Arianna would remain asleep in his bed, the sun would remain banished outside his window, and the city would be kept from reaching the following day. But then the story came to its natural end. That was the mercilessness of a story; you couldn’t keep it going beyond where it wanted to end, even to keep your grandmother alive. So, he wanted to travel with his grandmother once more. However, when he tried to write something about her without intending it as a narrative for the restitution fund, without Grandfather providing the spark of a few truthful details, nothing would come. The story had no purpose, no framework. It made Slava feel wretched; what kind of writer was he if he couldn’t invent on his own?