“But we’re doing well,” Lyuba interjected. “We have almost no mortgage on this house.”
“They have a Nissan Altima and a Ford Taurus,” Grandfather announced, pointing to his daughter and her husband.
“I’d stay all Japanese,” Garik sniffed. “I understand these things.”
“Well, of course, you’re in a taxi all day long.”
“It takes skill,” Garik reminded the older man.
“Wafers?” Vera intruded. “There are cookies and biscuits as well. And what about ice cream?”
While the adults talked, Slava counted. He had written twenty-two letters. Twenty-two times two hundred and fifty was fifty-five hundred. A third of the graves. Or was there a sliding scale? Five hundred for some, two hundred and fifty for others. Did Grandfather say, “Lazar, I charge five hundred. But you let my kid get at your pear-assed progeny, and we’ll make it two-fifty. Just do me a favor, don’t let him know. He’s fragile.”
No. It was Vera who’d done the bribing. She had called Grandfather like an equaclass="underline" Come over, make peace, and we’ll buy a letter. Slava in this was a marionette. She knew that Slava wouldn’t deny her — was he so obvious, a panting dog? — and with him clearing the way, they would come. She ran circles around him. In public, at Stas and Lara’s, she was his shadow. In private, she achieved what needed achieving. She was as tough as Grandfather — tougher. That’s why he liked her: He saw a kindred spirit. Slava was writing the letters, sure, but the boy was flighty. Slava imagined Vera wearing Grandfather down on the price, the old man charmed by her enterprise. He didn’t want to condescend, however, and made her work for it. They went back and forth: Two hundred. Three hundred. Two-fifty.
Slava inspected Vera with a contemptuous wonder. She felt his eyes and swiveled to face him. Then she pulled out the white envelope and thrust it at him with the eyes of a parent. He took it.
By the time he rejoined the conversation, they were hollering like drunk people. And they were. Vera quickly realized her mistake — what biscuits? They needed cognac. They pulled out the best in the Rudinskys’ possession, a bottle of Rémy Martin VSOP someone had gifted a long time before. (Grandfather reminded them that it was he who had gifted it, it was him.) Thimbles were emptied, lemon wedges sucked down, thimbles emptied again. Gallantly, Garik asked to drink for Slava’s grandmother. The noise ebbed and they gazed mournfully into the crystal in their hands. “It’s nice crystal,” Grandfather said. Then they drank. Eventually, Slava excused himself. They became upset. He said he had a letter to write. Then the waters parted as if for a king.
12
Outside the Rudinskys’, Slava was beset by an urgent desire to flee — to Manhattan, to Arianna’s. Throughout the preceding month, he had retraced back toward Bensonhurst and Midwood every step that he had taken in the opposite direction two years before. It had happened imperceptibly. You do not notice exactly when day becomes night, but you notice night.
He strode toward the subway. The sun was descending, fluorescent bulbs clicking on and casting a pale blue glow over the pears and lettuces in the bodegas. The heavy-breasted women who supervised the discount-clothing emporia that lined Eighty-Sixth Street wheeled in the enticement racks from the sidewalk, and a grandmother who had been selling lepeshki from a foldout table on Bay Twenty-Second Street sang quietly to herself as she stacked the plastic bins into a shopping cart.
Slava had taken the first steps up to the station when he saw him. There was no way to miss Israel Abramson — literary aspirant, anti-clericalist, subject of Slava’s second letter — crossing Eighty-Sixth Street. In ninety-degree weather, in his Red Army uniform, faded but crisp, a few medals swinging gently in cadence with his wavering, stiff-jointed lurch.
Israel took the sidewalk the way he had taken Kharkov during the war: left foot, right shoulder, right foot, left shoulder. He walked through the busiest thoroughfare in Bensonhurst, six lanes if you counted the side arteries where cars pulled off to double-park, as if tugging himself through an empty field. A bus blazed by, messing his hair; he didn’t even look up. Slava’s heart slid from his chest. He set off after Israel, but at a distance. He didn’t want him to die, but he didn’t want to embarrass him, either.
Crossing Eighty-Sixth, Slava was nearly sideswiped himself, young men staring sunkenly from the windows of an aircraft carrier masquerading as an SUV. “Vot you doo, fahk!” shouted a leery face with smoked-out eyes as the car passed. “I keel you, ha!” As American yearlings, the parents had driven shit-brown Cutlasses and rusty blue Buicks, but now they were able to purchase nice cars for the children.
Israel waddled across Benson Avenue, then Bath, then Cropsey. They were nearly in the ocean before he turned. When he finally stopped, they were in front of a stone building identified by a modest sign out front: Temple Beth-El. Israel regarded unhappily the mountain of steps that led to its heavy wood doors. He leaned on the iron railing that climbed to the doorway, mopped his forehead with a handkerchief, and began his ascent. Left hand clutching the railing, the right foot jerked to the next step, dragging the right shoulder along. Then the left half of him. He paused on every other step, breathing hard.
Five minutes later — maybe longer; Slava was transfixed — Israel’s shaking fingers waved at the door, trying to hook the handle. He yanked, nearly toppling, and disappeared inside. Slava emerged from the shelter of a heat-addled spruce and followed, taking two steps at a time. Midway up, he slowed. It felt heartless to fly up after what it had cost the older man.
Shabbat shalom. Inside, Israel was nodding his way down the aisle as he dragged himself toward a small table where memorial candles burned. A man in a skullcap, who stood with the firmness of someone who belonged to the premises, watched Israel with a polite smile, several other worshippers whispering among themselves in a corner. “Shabbat shalom,” Israel said. “Shabbat shalom.” But it was only Thursday night.
Dust swam in the last light filtering through the stained-glass windows on the balcony level. The panels ran the length of the four walls, like a seating gallery. The ceiling was a soaring cupola. Slava had always thought that this was what churches looked like. He had never been inside a synagogue.
Israel pulled himself to the table with candles and turned to face the rabbi. The rabbi nodded, opened a bureau, and withdrew a tasseled white cloth lined with blue stripes. He walked up to Israel, opened it with the precision of a soldier unfolding a flag, and draped it gently over Israel’s head and shoulders. When the rabbi stepped away, Israel addressed the table. “Dos ist for mayn wife,” he roared in Anglo-Yiddish. The flame of the candle in his hand met the wick of another. Then he muttered something that Slava was too far away to hear. Israel stood for a minute or two, his head bent over the candles, the edges of the tasseled cloth threatening to slide into the flames.
When he was finished, he removed the cloth from his shoulders and began to join the ends neatly. The rabbi stood to the side; it was clear that he had tried to intervene before, without use. Shakily, Israel brought the upper ends in to his chest, as if embracing someone. Pinching two joined corners in his left hand, he ran his right between the edges of the sheet, then pinched the other two corners. His fingers shook. Holding the joined ends in both hands, he turned the cloth ninety degrees and brought it again to his chest. He repeated the folding pattern until the cloth was a simple blue and white square barely larger than his palm, like a flag for the fallen. He placed it gently in the rabbi’s hand, kissed him on the cheek, and began the journey toward the door, hauling it open with the whole of himself.