“They have fifty kinds of toothpaste here,” Vera said. “You need help deciding.”
“I don’t need help deciding,” he said. “The least expensive one, you buy.”
“And then your teeth fall out,” Lyuba defended her daughter.
“They’ve fallen out already,” Lazar said.
“As if any of the advertisements tell you something truthful,” Garik said. “They just show you a woman throwing her hair around in the shower.”
“That I have no problem with,” Lazar said. He pointed at the decimated remains of the meal. “Lyuba, please clear. We need to get down to work. We can have tea later. And turn off these goddamn lights.”
Lyuba put down her fork and rose to clear the dishes. “Go, go,” Lazar dismissed everyone. “Give the men some time to talk.” Slava watched Vera, who was still eating, rise and retreat. She didn’t turn around to look at him. Lyuba would not walk out until all the dishes were piled in the sink. “I want to leave you a clean table!” she shouted in her defense. At last she left, too.
Lazar was so bent that he couldn’t look at Slava directly. His lips were violet, the face like a field darkening under a cloud. “Twenty-five is a grown-up’s age,” he said agnostically.
“You want us to be both,” Slava said. “Adults and children, at the same time.”
“Speak into this ear,” he said, and swiveled. Slava repeated himself.
“Even as a boy, you wanted, above all, justice,” Lazar said. “You wouldn’t let your grandfather get on the trolley to the beach in Italy without a ticket. When all of us took the trolley to the market to sell, we bought tickets not for the conductor but for you. You would have made a good Communist. Boy, did they hover over you. When you spoke, the whole table shut up. Four adults got quiet so you could speak. That’s a difference between you and Vera. She doesn’t expect the world to be something it’s not.”
“Let’s talk about the war,” Slava said.
“We’ll get to that,” he said. “How are things on the personal front?”
“Quiet,” Slava said. “Let’s talk about the war. I know you weren’t in a ghetto or camps, but tell me something anyway. It’ll help.”
“I was in a labor battalion, digging trenches. Then they conscripted me into infantry. Fought at Stalingrad. Lost half my hearing. End of story.”
“Say more. Details help.”
“How can they help if you can’t put it in?” Lazar slapped the table. “If you were in the ghetto, you get funds. If you had three limbs amputated at the front, you get nothing. I can’t tell you what the ghetto was like, I wasn’t there.”
“Tell me something else, then.”
“Into this ear!”
Slava repeated himself, shouting.
“Okay, I’ll tell you something else,” Lazar said. “I’ll tell you a story, though I don’t know if you know what to do with it. This was in the fifties. Fifty-two, right before that maniac died. It was getting real bad if you were a Jew. My brother Misha was walking home one night, and these drunks start yelling: ‘Kikes, kikes, one grave for all the kikes.’ Misha’s not one to keep quiet — he and your grandfather would have something to talk about. He took one of their eyeballs clean out. Bam.” Lazar Timofeyevich flicked his finger near Slava’s eye with a sudden energy. “That sort of thing gets you ten years in the clink,” he said. “So what did his older brother do? I had a friend with a military uniform from the Revolution, a collector’s item. Borrowed that. Another friend of mine was in a marching band; I told him to get in his uniform. And off we want to Eyeball’s house. You follow?”
“No,” Slava said.
“Don’t be naive, please,” Lazar said. “We were pretending to be policemen. So we get to Eyeball’s house, and we stick out two little address books like they’re IDs. ‘Esteemed citizens: We are here on orders of the precinct commander to ask you to drop the charges against Misha Rudinsky and permit the authorities to deal with this hooligan on our own terms. We promise to avenge your son in an appropriate way, if you catch our drift. If you go through the official channels, in prison this kike will have a square meal every day. If you leave him to us, we’ll make sure he never walks again. One less pair of Jewish feet trampling the ground.’”
“Did it work?” Slava said.
“No,” he said sourly. “They shut the door in our faces.”
“Oh.”
“You think I stopped there? I got our lawyer to get the case judge to come to our house for dinner. I am twenty-six years old at this point, Slava, basically five minutes older than you. We’re toasting to the health of the motherland and all that, and khop—I slip him a white envelope. Five large. And my little Misha got three years instead of ten. And I got to pick him up from the prison once a month and take him home for a home-cooked meal and a haircut.”
Slava nodded politely. All of a sudden, their twilight upon them, the old men of his old neighborhood were willing to talk about their valorous actions. Initially, they held back so as not to trouble the children with the frightening truth about life. But now, in the last lap, they were frantically unloading, like thieves dumping gold, pursued by the one collector from whom no reprieve. Finally, they had met something more fearful than the prospect of disturbing the sleep of their children.
Lazar Timofeyevich closed his eyes, so slowly and heavily that Slava could imagine the lids never rising again. When he opened them, he said: “You think I am telling you all this to stroke my dick one last time? I am telling you this so you can understand the difference between your own and not your own. Who is your best friend?”
“I’m sorry?”
“You’ve got a best friend?”
Slava thought about it. The only answer that came was Arianna. “No,” he said.
“I had ten best friends back home,” Lazar said. “Boys who would slit someone’s throat for me. All Jews. Every last one of them Jews. Now, whoever your closest friend is, would he do that for you?”
“I don’t know,” Slava said. “I don’t have — that many friends.”
“That girl,” Lazar said, pointing at the stairs, “will stand behind you like a tank, Slava. And you need it, with your head in the clouds. She may not know who Sakharov was, but she knows life, loyalty. You get caught doing what you’re doing? She would take the fall for you. That’s what I mean by your own. You name me one American person who will do that for you, and I will end this conversation. We brought you here, but that means we are Americans all of a sudden? Do you scoop from a box of cherries at the store without looking? No, you pick the good ones. Just because we are here, we have to live a thousand miles apart and call once a week to say hai-hava-yoo? Get a nice job, buy a big house — but you don’t have to take any more from this place.”
“So we are supposed to be foreigners here?” Slava said. “It wasn’t enough for you to have to be a foreigner back there, now you are choosing to be a foreigner here? They have psychopathic classifications for this kind of behavior.”
“We will become Americans, Slava, don’t worry,” Lazar said. “Your children will be almost Americans, and then their children will watch the shampoo commercials without understanding what could be different. It has to happen on its own timetable. You can’t rush the facts.”
“Life is long,” Slava said.
“Life is not long,” Lazar said. “At the front, twenty-five was a senior citizen. Lyuba was swaddling at twenty-five, very nice for her, but at twenty-five, I was commanding a Red Army platoon. That’s one thing I have to give those crazy medievals next door. They have five kids, six kids, seven kids. We are so small, Slava. We are always in danger of disappearing because of one thing or another.”