A Replacement Life by Boris Fishman Read Free Book Online

laughed. “I don’t think they’re giving out restitution for evacuations to Uzbekistan.”
    Grandfather poked the paper with a square nail. “They are, but it’s dicey. Some yes, some no. Either way, it’s less money. But ghettos and concentrationcamps, it’s a green path all the way. So, give me one of those. You’re a writer, aren’t you?”
    Slava opened his hands. “Now I’m a writer.”
    “You write for the newspaper where you work,” he said. “That’s what you said.”
    “It’s a magazine,” Slava said.
    “So, this is like an article for your newspaper.”
    “Articles for my newspaper are not invented.”
    “This country does not invent things?” Grandfather said, his eyes flashing. “Bush did not invent a reason to cut off Saddam’s balls? When the stocks fall down, it’s not because someone invented the numbers?”
    “This country has nothing to do with it!”
    “You don’t know how to do it. Is that it?”
    “I do know how to do it,” Slava said through his teeth.
    “Then do it,” Grandfather said. “For your grandmother. Do it.”
    There was a knock on the door. Slava’s mother’s head—round, defenseless—sneaked in. “Everything okay here, boys?” she said.
    “Okay, daughter,” Grandfather said with a strange formality.
    “There’s some dessert on the table,” she said. “I think people will start to go soon.”
    “We will, we will,” Grandfather said.
    “I ordered the gravestones,” she said. “They go up in a week.”
    “Mine?” Grandfather said.
    “Will be blank. There’s a plinth connecting them. Says Gelman. Your stone is black, Mama’s is lighter.”
    “The inscription?”
    “In Russian. ‘Don’t speak of them with grief: They are with us no more. But with gratitude: They were.’ A poem—Grusheff suggested it.”
    “Grusheff drank tea with Pushkin, if you believe what he says,” Grandfather said. “He probably wrote it himself. We should make sure there are no other stones with those lines. The words are nice, though.”
    “I’ll check, Papa,” Slava’s mother said and gently closed the door.
    Grandfather turned to Slava. “I need to remind you that your great-uncle Aaron— my brother—is in a mass grave in Latvia? Unkissed, he died. I wish you could read his letters, they weren’t in Yiddish. I went after him with a butcher knife when they called him up. A pinkie would have been enough to disqualify him. In ’41, at least. My year? Every boy conscripted in ’43”—he sliced his palm through the air—“cut down like grass.” He leaned in and whispered, “I wasn’t going to volunteer to be cannon fodder. You wouldn’t be here. I stayed alive.”
    “What does Aaron have to do with it?” Slava said. “Look. It says: ‘Ghettos, forced labor, concentration camps . . . What did the subject suffer between 1939 to 1945?’ The subject. Not you. You didn’t suffer.”
    “I didn’t suffer?” Grandfather’s eyes sparkled. “I’ve got a grave already, I didn’t suffer. God bless you, you know that?” He snorted, as if he’d been asked to sell a perfectly healthy horse at half value. “All the men were taken right away: Aaron, Father, all the cousins. Father was too old for infantry, so they took him to Heavy Labor. Two years later, there’s a knock at the door. I see this skeleton in rags, so I shout to my mother, ‘There’s a beggar at the door, give him some food!’ Not a strange sight in those days. And he starts weeping. It was Father. A week later, they told us about Aaron. Killed by artillery. I wanted to spare my mother losing the last of her men, so yes, I went to Uzbekistan. Not to live in a palace—to pick pockets and piss myself on the street so they’d think I was a retard and not draft me.” He looked away. “Look, I came back. I enlisted.”
    “On a ship in liberated territory,” Slava said. “Look, I didn’t make up the rules. The paper says: ‘Ghettos, forced labor, concentration