“Why does your grandfather know how Uzbeks drink tea?” Arianna said when the waitress departed.
“That was where he was evacuated during the war,” Slava said cautiously.
“They’re talking about expanding eligibility,” she said. “It’s in the paper. He might qualify in the end.”
“We’re hoping,” Slava said twice as cautiously.
“I can’t imagine what it’s like there.”
“He was conscription age; he would piss himself in the street so recruiters would think he was retarded.”
“You always talk about him.”
“You asked about him.”
“I meant you never talk about your parents. And I only talk about my parents.”
“I even have my grandfather’s last name instead of my father’s,” Slava said. “They made the decisions, I guess. I would like to meet the Eagle.”
“Sandra has her charms, too.”
“I mean that I like the way you feel about him more.”
She looked toward the water. “Do you know that in seven years in New York, I haven’t seen the ocean.”
“How does it compare to the other one?”
“Whenever I read The Stranger, when he kills the Arab on the beach, this is how I imagine it. The water so blue that it’s black. And the sun so bright that everything feels bleached.”
“You’ve read it more than once?”
“I reread books all the time. Especially if they made you read it in high school. Then it’s like a measuring stick. This is what I thought about it at seventeen, this is what I think about it now. I used to love One Hundred Years of Solitude—if you leave out all the chauvinist crap. But I couldn’t get through it last year. The woman eats dirt, the colonel’s blood flows from the war back to the house where he was born… so melodramatic. It’s me right now, not the book; I’ll try again in a couple of years. I think good books should be translated once per generation. I have a Stranger from 1948 and 1982, but from England, and a 1988 American. They’re all different.” She sipped her tea, holding the piala from below with both palms. “García Márquez was brought up by his grandparents. That’s the way I think of you.”
He laughed. “You’re rambling. Are you nervous?”
She smiled. “Maybe.”
He extended a hand toward her. She placed a palm inside it. It was warm from the bottom of the tea bowl.
“Was Grandfather telling the truth?” Slava said. “Are you less warm because you are as hot as the weather?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Let’s go outside and check.”
Miraculously, the ocean was stingingly crisp despite having been under assault from the sun for two months. It would stay swimmable until October, this guest welcome to linger. Arianna squealed as the water hit her toes. The rocketing spray climbed up her legs. He had forgotten all about the neighborhood’s minefield of betrayal. Momentarily, he felt exempted from responsibility.
“It smells like fish,” she said.
“No, fish smells like it,” he said. They laughed. She kicked the surf in his direction. He filled his mouth with seawater and wouldn’t stop chasing her until he had squirted it down her back.
They fell asleep on the sand, his rolled-up T-shirt for his pillow and his chest for hers. He smelled the brine on her face as he dozed off. His last thought before dozing off was: He was his best with her and his worst.
The sun had slunk off by the time he awoke. Arianna still slept, so he didn’t dare move. The departing yolk of the sun streaked a final tantrum of pinks, violets, and golds, a better sunset than the hot, sweaty day deserved. He remembered reading in one of his newspapers that postcard sunsets were actually caused by excess smog. Just as human ash could give you gorgeous five-pound tomatoes. Just as Yevgeny Gelman, Israel Abramson, and Lazar Rudinsky, a hundred years later, would give you Arianna Bock. Everything in between was a loss, a write-off.
When she awoke, they wandered back down to the ocean’s edge, the lapping sheets of the Atlantic theirs alone except for a couple petting by the lifeguard stand. The evening was taking on a bruised purple glow. A lone streetlight called them back from the boardwalk. The sand beneath them had cooled quickly, but if you buried your feet, it was still warm below.
“You were born over there,” she said, and pointed into the darkness.
“The ocean in the dark freaks me out,” he said.
“Me, too,” she said.
She took his hand and they tiptoed into the cold black water. Slava had been staring at the river from the edge of his neighborhood for years, but this was his first step inside the water that bordered New York on all sides. When you thought about it, it was as waterbound as a Venice, or an Amsterdam, but here, this natural boundary had been reduced to a sideshow. You did not think of New York as a water city. What if the water rose, as the scientists kept saying now and then. What would go first? What would be carried away, and what would rise in its place? The thought of a different city, a city he could have a hand in, made him excited and gave him the boldness to wade deeper into the impenetrable ocean.
15
MONDAY, AUGUST 28, 2006
On Monday, the Times carried a story about a lawsuit against the German government by a group calling itself Advocates for Historical Justice. The plaintiffs, represented by an Australian attorney with the surely invented name of Howard Settledecker, had “made an appeal to the German Holocaust restitution funds to revise eligibility requirements to include those on the Eastern Front who had never been incarcerated in a ghetto or a concentration camp but had suffered nevertheless as a result of the German invasion.”
Beau wore suspenders over a pink shirt. The sleeve creases could cut. His eyes gleamed with a weekend of rest, sport, and other diversions. He greeted everyone and slid his thumbs under his suspenders. “The fall issue this Friday,” he said. “We might have late-breaking up front. Gruber is still filing. But it has to be shuttered on Friday. Acceptable to everyone?” Everyone nodded.
“There’s a story in the Times today about Holocaust reparations,” Beau went on. “Anyone read it? You know how I feel about the Times beating us, so we might ignore it. But just in case, there’s a press conference this afternoon at the Museum of Jewish Heritage. Howard Settledecker! You’re in for a treat. Mr. Grayson, when did my profile run?”
“I’ll look it up, Mr. Reasons,” Mr. Grayson said. “Nineteen ninety-seven, I believe.”
“Who wants it?” Beau said. “I want two.”
A familiar hand rose, the cuff of the blazer riding down to the elbow.
“Peter,” Beau said. “Excellent. Who else?”
The cubicles produced no response. Slava’s mind was floating with Otto, trying to imagine the angles.
“How about a rematch?” Beau said. “Mr. Gelman, can we have the honor? Let’s see what our little clinic accomplished.”
Slava looked up, startled. He felt Arianna at his temple again. He couldn’t understand what she was trying to telegraph. Do it? Don’t do it?
“Mr. Gelman?” Beau said. “Should I plead for you to take an assignment from Century?” The group tittered nervously.
Slava didn’t speak.
“I’ll take that as a yes,” Beau said.
“Want to just go downtown together?” Peter said. “Split a cab?”