“Where are you taking me?” she said.
“Following the moment,” he said, staring at the cabbie’s brown neck. He made himself take her hand.
They rode silently. The Upper West Side turned into Midtown, then Chelsea, the West Village, Battery Park — self-conscious, he splurged for the tunnel — and into Brooklyn.
“Where are we going?” she laughed.
“You don’t love being in the dark?” he said as unstiffly as he could, though it came out stiff all the same. Now they had to keep holding hands to pretend they weren’t angry at each other. Slava stared out his window. The street slowly revealed itself as familiar — he knew it only relative to the subway, so he recognized it with delay. He had been mugged here. Grandfather and Grandmother lived nearby then, before they found the better subsidized apartment in Midwood. The mugger had been Slav — not a Jew, but still, one of theirs. He had violet splotches of sleeplessness under his eyes and a long knife under his T-shirt — comically long, with a gilt handle, like a circus saber. Graciously, he explained: His family had just spent their savings on bail, and he needed cash for a lawyer.
Slava was with Igor Kraz, the boy who would become the proctologist. He had taught Slava how to karate-kick properly, and how to masturbate into a pillow, so there was use to having him around. He was studded with diamonds. Slava had nothing more than a silver bracelet and necklace, even these like insects he wanted to brush off. The jewelry had nothing to do with them; they were broadcasting their families’ progress in America. Grandfather was upset with Slava for agreeing to nothing richer than silver. “But we can do better,” he said again and again. “Why does he wear gold and you only silver? What, we don’t have?”
When the mugger asked for their jewelry, they handed it over. The young proctologist had forgotten all his karate kicks. And when the thief asked for their addresses, to keep them from squealing, they told him the truth. He must have realized the angelfaces he had collared that day, because then he told the boys to be at the same corner an hour later with a thousand dollars. When they phoned their parents, the first thing they said was they needed a thousand dollars.
They were their parents’ and grandparents’ children. They did what they were told, parents or muggers, as they had been taught. Compliance with instructions — just say what the rules were — was as molecularly satisfying as a cool plum on a hot day. When he was little, the satisfaction of it reached to the part of Slava that burned when the tea he was drinking was too hot. So how had he turned out a forger? Had his grandfather’s fraudulence found its way into him despite the Gelmans’ best efforts to raise an obedient person? You can’t stop the blood, it goes where it wants? Maybe the Gelmans, older and wiser, understood this and had been trying to keep him close in order to shelter him from it. This part of him — his proper and corrupt soul — appeared only when he squirmed out of their reach. He wished badly to ask Arianna, because he knew she would offer something that he hadn’t considered, that would make him think about it differently. But he couldn’t. He groaned, and she squeezed his hand.
The taxi stopped on Brighton Sixth. She opened her wallet, but he covered her hand and paid. Whipped by wind from the water, the air was less thick here, the sun exhausted by the punishment it had been meting out all afternoon. They stood looking down Brighton Beach Avenue, Arianna waiting for a signal from Slava. He glared at the doomed souls wandering past them, their legs varicose and bent, the jowls swimming in fat, bellies hung over the legs like overripe fruit. (Had Otto made his way down here, to see firsthand what he was dealing with in his folders, or did he prefer to keep his distance?) Yes, they weren’t easy to be near. The mesh bags stuffed with discount tomatoes, the lumbering bodies heedless of traffic lights, the threadbare emporia that had to traffic in furs and DVDs and manicures to squeeze from the stone of this life the blood of a dollar. And these were the honest ones. After fifty years of Soviet chatteldom, they had come here to get fucked in the ass for a little bit longer before packing off to a spot at Lincoln Cemetery, even this impossible to acquire without money being passed under the table. They never even voted.
“You’re always asking,” Slava said. “Here it is. Here they are.”
“Show it to me,” she said.
They walked without plan, happenings from long ago reminding themselves to Slava. In this store, his grandfather had purchased a mink for Slava’s mother without paying a dollar. The owner of the store, a man whose existence depended on wringing every penny out of the mink in Grandfather’s hands, had ended up pleading with him to take it for free, though Slava didn’t recall the exact reason or, more likely, was too young to comprehend the machinations, though he was old enough to understand that minks weren’t free and watched his grandfather from below with wonder. That was Grandfather. Arianna reiterated her desire to meet him. People always wanted to meet Grandfather when you told them about him, Slava said. They lit up.
Here were Uzbeks, here Tajiks, here Georgians, here Moldovans. Here you could get a manicure and pedicure for ten dollars. (This truly elevated Arianna’s eyebrows.) They were staring at the row of identically frost-haired women working the chairs of the beauty salon when Slava froze. Without thinking, he had brought Arianna to a neighborhood where half a dozen homes had enjoyed from him forged letters. What an amateur. His little heart had been wounded — he wanted to show her something that he, not she, knew, and he’d just yielded to the impulse. Grandfather had passed down his fraudulent soul? Slava was a pinkie on Grandfather’s hand, no more.
“What is it?” Arianna said.
“So I just wanted to show you,” he said quickly. “We can go.” He cursed himself a second time; he was retreating as artlessly as he had approached.
“What?” she said. “We just got here. I want to go drink hot tea, Uzbek-style. Take me, please.”
As they walked to the boardwalk, he tried to map the homes that required a wide berth and half listened as Arianna babbled on about their surroundings. Where he saw desperation and scraping, she saw another act in New York’s great ethnic circus. As they walked past the Key Food, he thought he spotted old Anna Kots waddling out with a grocery cart, but it was a double. At the chaikhana, he strongly recommended a table in the back, away from the windows. It was cooler by the windows, Arianna said — they had been flung open, the sea spangling with a heat-crazed blue light past the wide beach. “I thought you wanted to be hot, like the Uzbeks,” he said, and she obeyed.
“What is it?” she said when they were seated.
“Nothing, nothing,” he said.
“Is it strange for you to be here?”
He was saved by the arrival of a waitress in an Uzbek rug cap. An earpiece wire coiled out of her ear. “Are you in the FBI?” he joked to her in Russian. She laughed — this was how the servers communicated with the kitchen. Arianna waited for a translation, but none came. She was asked, however, to choose the tea. Realizing that Slava was accompanied by an American, the waitress became formal. When she returned, she set down the tray and held up each item: “This is green tea, please—kuk-choi. This is spoons, please.” She held up two rug caps: yes or no? Slava said no, Arianna said yes. The waitress permitted herself a smile and said in English: “I leave, you decide.”