Rabbi Bachman returned inside, and Israel stuffed his arm into the crook of Slava’s. “See these, mal’chik?” He pointed to the medals on his uniform. “Reconnaissance, ’44 to ’45. I had you as far back as Eighty-Sixth Street. Big deal you are — you can barely cross the street. My heart was in my feet, looking at you back there. Let’s go.”
“Why did you tell him I was your grandson?” Slava said.
“What are you, embarrassed?”
“No,” Slava said. “No.”
“So why are we talking about this, let’s go.”
Slava took the steps at Israel’s stride. Up close, it was worse. Each step cost him something dear. At home, he had looked sturdy, nearly athletic, in his gym trousers, but the arm that leaned on Slava now was flabby as dough, the left hand trembling in an eternal so-so. Ahead of them, the descending disk of the sun spread a tired lemon glow.
“Let’s take a break,” Slava said when they had reached the bottom of the stairs. “Let’s sit down.”
“You can’t sit down on concrete, you’ll catch cold,” Israel said.
“It’s a hundred and fifty degrees,” Slava said. “Sit down and rest.”
“If I sit down here, I’ll never get up,” he said. “Look how low to the ground.”
“Can you lean against the railing? I am going to sit down.”
“What are you, a pensioner? Let’s go.”
“For just a moment,” Slava said. He made sure that Israel was attached to the railing and lowered himself. The step was inches from the pavement. Was it simply performing the ritual of sitting on a low place in honor of the deceased that mattered, or were you also supposed to feel something? Slava waited, but he didn’t feel anything. The people who covered mirrors, sat on low stools, lit candles, how did they come to feel what they felt? Did you have to be born into it? What was the trick?
There was a terrible rumble next to him. Israel had deposited himself a step above. “If we’re resting, we’re resting,” he said.
“It doesn’t bother you to go in there?” Slava said.
Israel blew his nose, a thumb at each nostril. “Where else would I go if I want to sing a song for my wife? The mosque on Eighty-Sixth Street? Masjid Shmashid? No, I am a Jew. I don’t go up there, you think that will make him come back? I take what I can.”
“Pick and choose,” Slava said sourly.
“I guess so,” Israel said. “Except I didn’t choose for my son to become a fanatic and run off to Israel. All the same, I’d rather he was happy without me than unhappy with. Do you think he might have done that because he was unhappy? Unhappy with me and my wife?”
Slava turned to look at Israel. The old man’s face was pinched at the thought. Slava waved him away. “They have studies about this sort of thing,” he lied. “I mean atheists who come and convert. It’s other factors. It’s not family. Weren’t you his family in the Soviet Union?”
“Maybe it’s something in this place,” he said weakly. He looked on the verge of tears.
“Maybe,” Slava said.
Israel nodded, the forehead folded. Slava withdrew the white envelope from his jeans pocket. Palmed by many hands, it was acquiring a foxed edge. He extended it to Israel.
“What’s this?”
“There was a misunderstanding,” Slava said. “I don’t know how much it was, but two-fifty to start.”
“It was two-fifty.”
“Then we’re square.”
“But who gives you for the work?”
“I’ve been given.” Slava rose and tucked the envelope into the pocket of Israel’s uniform. “Let’s go. I’ve got a long night ahead.”
“You’re still giving us our tales of woe and deceit?”
“Those very same,” Slava said.
“And what happens when it’s all over?” Israel said. “The deadline’s next week. What do you do at that magazine of yours, anyway?”
“If some small newspaper somewhere makes a mistake, we make a joke about it.”
“We had that in Russia, too. The capital likes to laugh at the provinces. Makes it feel like the capital.”
Slava shrugged. That work seemed so remote. After submitting the fabricated entries for “The Hoot,” Slava returned to properly sourced items, though largely because he’d hit a lucky streak and, for a week or two, the flubs were finding him. But he was dry again, and in the past two weeks, he had slipped in a couple of inventions. It didn’t matter. Slava’s heroic bulwarking of the national decline of small-town newspapers through the invention of the Rinkelrinck (Ark.) Gazette had earned notice neither in Arkansas nor Century.
“I was going to heat up some soup for us,” Israel said. “From a can but excellent.”
Slava saw Israel climbing into the cupboard where the synagogue’s gifts collected, withdrawing a can of soup too large for one — what he lacked in human variety, Israel made up for soup-wise: carrot ginger, black bean, ten-vegetable — and slurping alone in the falling light outside his ground-level window.
“Next time,” Slava promised.
“You said that last time,” Israel said, acquiring a pained expression. Slava felt a familiar wave of guilt. Israel cocked his eyebrows. “Ha! Take it easy, I’m kidding. Slow on the uptake, you are.” He clapped Slava on the shoulder. “Listen, what is your attitude toward presents?”
“Presents?”
“Presents. Good times, laughter, a long table, a bottle or three. You’re a heavy one.”
“When I want a good time, I call you to hear a compliment.”
“Self-pity flatters no man. I want you to take this money back. And have a good time.”
“How many months did it take you to collect that amount?” Slava said.
“This is the use that would make me most satisfied.”
For a third time that evening, Slava’s hand closed around the accursed envelope.
13
Slava dragged the ton of himself home. On the subway, he tried to jot down ideas for Lazar’s letter, but he had none. The old man was right — what had happened to him (labor battalion, infantry, Stalingrad, hearing) was useless. Also, Slava was out of ideas. Every single item that Slava had scratched into his notebook from the history books had a line through it.
The coarseness of the last entry forced up a nauseating taste in his throat. Was he a monster, the details of death merely the instruments of a story, kindling for a vocation he didn’t have the talent to practice another way? However, those details made for good stories — stories that stayed with him days after he’d written them, and would earn money for sufferers. What was coarse, then? When he abandoned his grandmother — that was coarse. When he agreed to stop at undetailed reverence and inquire no further about her — that was coarse. Perhaps one becomes aware of one’s coarseness only when it’s too late to do anything about it: Isaac Newton’s little-known Fourth Law of Motion, Pertaining to the Maneuvers of the Soul.
What was coarser, to revere someone falsely for sainthood, or to know someone’s sin but intimately? And if you couldn’t know, then invent. Slava had not planned to have his grandmother stare Shulamit into suffocating her baby. (She hadn’t, had she? He didn’t answer.) Grandmother was fierce, everyone said, and he was trying to make her fierce, but then she wriggled out of his hands and started staring at Shulamit in that basement. (Did that mean Grandmother would have suffocated her own child?) If you wanted to write a good story, the facts had to become a story’s instruments. You couldn’t write without being coarse to the facts.