“Anyway, your grandfather decides twelve a day’s not enough. He wants your grandmother to have someone around the clock. So he gives the twelve-hour nurse some money and tells her to call the agency to ask for an extension on the hours. ‘The husband’s gone bad from helping take care of the wife,’ she says. ‘They need someone full-time.’
“So the assessor comes from the city. All this is from your grandfather’s lips, by the way, because he’s a braggart. The assessor comes and your grandfather is sitting there like a vegetable. Drooling, head keeled over like it’s not connected to the rest of him. The assessor starts calling to him—‘Yevgeny, Yevgeny’—so your grandfather starts grunting and gnashing his teeth. He acted out the whole thing in front of me at Korolenko’s office. Minus the bowel-loosening. Your grandfather should have moved to Hollywood.”
“And they got twenty-four hours,” Slava said. “Berta.”
“You know who gets twenty-four hours, typically?” Israel said. “Quadriplegics, war veterans, and psychotics. But he wanted it for your grandmother, and he got it. Your grandfather gets things.”
“He got me,” Slava said. Through the little window, the light was beginning to steal out of the sky.
“You are too smart for that,” Israel said.
“Don’t be sure,” Slava said.
“I’ve known him sixty years,” Israel said. “‘A child of other people’s gardens,’ they called him. He got what needed to be got. The salami, the caviar, the cognac, the minks. Nobody had access to those things but Party people with special privileges. Even I can’t tell you how he — a barber — got what he got. Do you know how wealthy your family was at home? In secret, but still. Not everyone had the stomach for it. How many people did he keep in Climat perfume, bananas, free trips to Crimea, so their mouths would stay closed about what he got for himself, your grandmother, your mama, you? I saw him on the street one time. It was hotter than a furnace outside, and he’s wearing an overcoat. It looked like he had a piglet in there. I said, ‘Zhenya, what’s with the coat?’”
“He had something stuffed in there,” Slava said.
“Fifteen sticks of salami taped to the insides!” Israel sniggered. “Like rocket launchers! That salami was so fresh it could talk. You understand if you got stopped with fifteen sticks of salami? That’s ‘intent to sell,’ ‘private enterprise,’ prison.
“One salami went to the woman in ticketing at the Aeroflot office on Karl Marx Street. One went to the director of the kindergarten where your little mama was enrolled. One went to the pediatrician at the local clinic, so your mama wouldn’t have to wait three days for a house call if God forbid she got ill. You watched him with awe. My hand never rose to try something similar.”
“Why not?”
“Why not. I don’t know. Just the way you’re made, I guess.” Israel coughed into his sleeve. Slava rose and got him a glass of water. The washer was missing from the faucet, and water sprayed all over the countertop. Slava wiped it up with a towel.
“I envied him,” Israel said when Slava returned. He lapped greedily at the glass. “Oh, this is good. Thank you. After the war, you’d be at a restaurant with a girl, and these drunk zhloby would stumble over: ‘Look at these kikes feasting away!’ And you have to hang your head because you don’t want trouble, because there’s a million more where they came from. But you’re scalding inside, because until then maybe you were trying to impress the girl.
“But your grandfather, he never just sat there. He got up and he beat that zhlob to a pulp, right then and there, while everyone watched, even police. Everybody got stiff when Zhenya Gelman walked into a restaurant.”
Israel drained his glass and wiped his mouth with a handkerchief. “During the war, there were seven attempted outbreaks from ghettos by Jews,” he said. “Ask me how many times Soviet soldiers tried to break out of German POW camps? Find me enough for one hand. But it was always ‘“Fought” in Uzbekistan, did you, kike?’ Because the war never came to Uzbekistan. At the end of the war, there were more than a hundred, maybe two hundred, Jews decorated Heroes of the USSR, and you can imagine how many more there would have been if that prick Stalin wasn’t an anti-Semite. I mean, you had Jewish war veterans without legs. But the way people looked at you, it’s as if they thought you amputated them yourself to make it look like you’d fought.”
“Were you in Uzbekistan during the war?” Slava said.
“I was getting shrapnel in my leg under Kharkov,” Israel said. He gave Slava a little ballet step and hiked up his gym trouser, revealing a veiny, pockmarked calf. “I could use a new leg, too.”
“Well, your fearless Yevgeny Gelman was in Uzbekistan,” Slava said.
“I’m too old for grudges, Slava,” Israel waved. “It kills me more than the other person.”
Slava sighed. “I should start heading back soon,” he said. “It’s a long way.”
“I was going to make some dinner for us,” Israel said. “Microwave, but not bad.”
“Next time,” Slava said.
“I’ve never been to Manhattan,” Israel said. “I would like to sometime. All those lights. They show it on television. Can you sleep, with all those lights?”
“You said what I wrote needs an improvement,” Slava said.
“Oh, it’s good, Slava,” he nodded. “It’s got that silence of ours. That terrible Russian silence that the Americans don’t understand. They are always making noise because they need to forget life is going to end. But we remember, and so we have silence, even when we’re shouting and laughing.”
“So?” Slava said. “You want silence, I’ll give you silence.”
“But think about it, Slava,” Israel said, clucking his tongue. “You’re Fritz Fritzovich reviewing these claims, may all those people get covered up to their heads. And you get this application. Where was the individual between 1939 and 1945. And you get this… this… Adolf is going to believe that an eighty-year-old man, an immigrant fart, wrote what you wrote?”
“He could have had his grandson translate it for him,” Slava said tightly. “That’s not unimaginable. The English is the grandson’s and the grandson is fluent. Doesn’t mean the story has to be false.”
“The grandson is fluent, all right,” Israel said. “But the story. You’re trying to avoid detection or what? It’s like a puppet theater, you know? What do they call it? Not puppet theater — with the marionettes.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“You’ve got this movie scene. Beautiful moment, beautifully written, the cows. But no beginning, no middle, no end. Who are we, where did we live? Look at some books. The Minsk ghetto was formed on such-and-such date. We lived at such-and-such address from this date to this date. This is where we were moved when they put up the wire. And then you can do your beautiful sentences. But you need more than that. Nice sentences is like a beautiful woman who doesn’t know how to cook. It’s not your story. Forget about yourself for a moment.”
“And where am I supposed to put all that silence of yours in this encyclopedia version?” Slava said.
“Oh, but that’s for you to figure out!” Israel giggled.
“A fact can’t be wrong if it isn’t a fact,” Slava said expertly. “You start feeding numbers and dates in there, they’re going to get their record books out. That’s how they check facts, Israel. I have it on good authority.”
“You’ll know what to do.”