Downstairs, waiting with Vera for the cruiserweight’s taxi in the stifling air of the street, Slava bristled with a child’s excitement. He repeated a maneuver from their pas de deux.
She smiled. “I’m happy you’re happy,” she said. He toed the curb, recalling the evening, and laughed to himself. “So, listen,” she said. “I have an idea for how to get them together.” She had switched back to English.
“Who?” he blinked.
“Our parents.”
“Ve-ra!” he said, trying to be playful. “Let it be. It’s not our business. They’re grown-ups.”
She shrugged and looked away, disappointed. “I told my mother we talked.”
“Was she angry?” Slava said.
“No, she was happy,” she said. “She can’t do it herself, but if I do it, it’s okay. We are too small here to divide from argument. Did I say that right?”
“Sure.”
“You speak like an American, like you were born here.”
“We came here at the same age,” he said.
“But I stayed in Brooklyn. I speak Russian most of the day. Sometimes full days with no English. In Italy, my parents always wanted me to play with you. Slava is a good boy, he studies his translation book. You run away and I stay, and my parents still always say: Why you can’t be more like Slava?”
Slava’s excitement was emptying into the overheated air. There was a honk, and a second later, Vova skirted the curb with a flourish. Slava, until now no ally of the cruiserweight, felt a tremor of gratitude.
“How was it?” Vova asked cheerfully when the young pair was once again lodged in his rearview mirror.
“Very nice,” Vera said quietly.
“And where is my care package from the table?” Vova said flirtatiously. Slava wanted to brain him.
“Oh my God, I am so embarrassed,” Vera said, covering her mouth. “And it was a good table. Lara’s mom was by earlier and cooked everything. Let me go upstairs.”
Vova peeled off before his martyrdom could be compromised. They rode the rest of the way in a merciful silence. Slava thought of Arianna. Despite having been overcome with guilt after she called, he hadn’t thought of her again all evening. Only a week had passed since Bar Kabul — he couldn’t see friends one night? Then why did he lie about where he was? He moaned in annoyance, raising a look from Vera. “Nothing, nothing,” he said.
“That’s it, my doll,” Vova said when they’d pulled up at the curb of Vera’s building. Vova and Slava caught each other’s eyes in the rearview mirror and surged into action at the same time. Vera was seated next to Slava in the back, on the other side of the sedan from Vova, so the gentlemen started out even. The driver door (Vova) and the rear left (Slava) opened at the same time, the two of them emerging to circle the vehicle — Vova around the hood, Slava around the trunk — in order to open Vera’s door. They arrived at the same time. Vova lowered his head with a taunting smirk, acknowledging defeat.
“Thank you, Slava,” Vera said, her lips on his cheek. “Very nice evening. Did you have a good time?” Her drawn face indicated that she didn’t expect a reply. She set off down the rain-slicked flagstone leading to her entrance. Slava felt as if he should run after her and apologize, but for what? Vova, next to him, glared like a lunatic brother of the groom. As Vera entered the foyer, she waved. Like a pair in a musical, Vova and Slava waved back. The neighborhood floated in an unearthly quiet.
“Get in,” Vova said.
“No, I’ll walk,” Slava said. “I’ll pay, of course.”
“Get in, get in, paramour,” Vova said. “You need the train for Manhattan, right? At this hour, you need the Q. Let’s go.” Pathetically, Slava obeyed.
“Quite a performance, Romeo,” Vova said when they were inside the car. Perhaps he had insisted on driving him, Slava thought, so he could torment him all the way to the subway station. “Don’t feel bad,” Vova went on. “With a girl like that, it won’t happen the first time. The parents have to meet you, that whole dance. Mama has to give the green light.”
“You are speaking from firsthand experience?” Slava said.
Vova studied Slava in the rearview. “I am trying to help you, Casanova,” he said. “It helps if there’s competition. Wakes them up a little.”
“I really appreciate it,” Slava said.
“Don’t sweat it,” he said. “We’re just speaking here, like men.”
A light rain returned to streak the windows of the taxi. Slava stared at the empty streets of neighborhoods he had not seen in years. He had been wrong about it all looking the same. Here things changed, too, just more imperceptibly. He wondered if Arianna had gone to her club by herself. He saw her hair whipping around her shoulders as she danced to the Little Darlings. He thought briefly about taking Vova’s taxi all the way to the Upper West Side, but he couldn’t do that now, with Vera’s perfume all over him.
Extracting himself from Vova’s taxi at the Q station, Slava gave him eight dollars above the owed total. They shook hands through the window, Slava’s palm like a peanut in Vova’s tonnish maw. “Fear not, chuvak!” Vova said, and cleared a pellet of snot onto the pavement. “We’re on the same side.” And with that, he drove off.
10
AUGUST 2006
Even in frailty and mourning, Grandfather performed. After a couple of days, Slava gave up trying to understand, to map and figure the links. Within forty-eight hours, he had calls from a Bukharan Jew named Lev, who had never gone west of Kazakhstan, let alone Nazi-held territory; a young woman who wanted Slava to take down the story of her father, a procurement official in the Soviet Ministry of Forests; a pensioner from Perm who began with a complaint about a willful granddaughter (who, by the way, was single); and a couple from Bashkiria who wanted Slava to know that the Soviet government had created a special home for Soviet Jews in the Far East, where they had visited twice in their capacities as poet laureate of Ufa (he) and the editor of the literary magazine Kalibr (she). Slava said yes to almost everyone. He drew the line at one grandmother who wanted a letter to President Bush requesting a larger apartment, and an old man who simply needed a ride to the supermarket. Everyone else, he took.
In their stories, his grandmother went to clear the rubble from bomb damage. She patched up German army uniforms, her fingers avoiding those two hideous thunderbolts. She boiled syringes at the hospital. She revealed herself as a strong-headed young woman. Not very good in school. Obedient. Liked clothes. Lucky that her father was a tailor. Slava watched her savor a piece of dark bread with sunflower oil.
With a hill of unfolded newspapers and magazines on his desk concealing his stack of history books, he watched the office clock crawl with impossible slowness. When the clock hands agreed on six P.M. and Arianna left for uptown, thinking he was staying to work, he ran to the Brooklyn-bound subways. He became a connoisseur of dispatcher accents, the various types of train lurches and grunts, bodega banners, night skies, and Brooklyn’s regional humor.
To Lev the Bukharan Jew, he gave Irvin’s broken English. (“Camp wall was like giant, bigger than tree. Climb was if you wanted sueycide, and nobody who say nice Polish girl from village give food hush-hush over wall is saying accurate. Wall was impossible. And there was not being nice Polish girls.”) The forestry official, ever the Soviet bureaucrat, appended to his claim letter a list of newspaper clippings and maps. He took an academician’s pleasure in pointing out that the wild forests of western Belarus and eastern Poland where the partisans hid and that the Germans themselves feared to enter — Perelaz, Zabielowo, Chrapiniewo, Lipiczanska, Jasinowo, Nalibocka, even their names impenetrable — were such inaccessible refuges for those bent on sedition that, after the war, the Soviets turned forestry management into a branch of state security.