In the kitchen, a pot crashed into another, interrupting the rush of the sink water. A woman cursed herself for clumsiness. Grandfather lifted his head, his eyes alert once again. “Come,” he said, his hand on Slava’s forearm. “Things change, you don’t come for so long.” Rising, he leaned on Slava’s arm with more weight than he needed.
They filled the kitchen doorway arm in arm, like a pair of lovers. The blue rims of Grandfather’s eyes welled with tears. “Berta,” he said hoarsely. “My grandson.” Death or no death, Grandfather could ingratiate himself with his new home attendant by formally introducing his grandson.
Like a Soviet high-rise, each floor of Berta was stuffed beyond capacity. Silver polish gleamed from her toes, wedged into platforms that she was using as house slippers; flower-print capri tights encased in a death grip the meat-rack haunch of her legs. Slava felt a treacherous lurch in his groin. She hadn’t heard Grandfather.
“Berta!” Grandfather barked. His arm tensed and he rapped the wall with his knuckles. Berta spun around. Underneath its creases and the worried, close set of the eyes, her face had preserved its young, unblemished beauty. A buttery gleam rose from the skin.
“The boy!” she shrieked. Holding up her long yellow dish gloves as if placating a mugger, she waddled toward Slava and enclosed him in the flab of her arms. Berta also had to make a demonstration before Grandfather. One phone call from him to the assignments coordinator at the home-nurse agency, who received from Grandfather a monthly gift of chocolates and perfume, and Berta would be reassigned to a paraplegic who needed his ass wiped and his oatmeal spoon-fed. Slav Berta, whose people had used to terrorize Jews like Grandfather! This — more than the profusion of meat in American supermarkets, the open availability of rare technology, even the cavalierness with which Americans spoke of their president — was the mysterious grandeur of the country that had taken in the Gelmans of Minsk. It had the power to turn tormentors into kitchen help.
Berta held Slava like the flaps of a coat in winter, a hard-on developing inside his slacks. On the stovetop, a pan sizzled with butter and onions. That was the sweetness in the air. The after-funeral table would stagger with food. The guests had to see: This house did not lack for provisions.
As Slava embraced in Grandmother’s kitchen a woman he’d never met with an intimacy neither of them felt, the feeling he had begun to remember for Grandmother receded, like someone gently tiptoeing out of the wrong room. At the funeral service, he would be accused of indifference while Mother and Grandfather clutched each other and wailed. The guests had to see.
It had taken two years of failing to get published by Century magazine to piece together the facts. Our great realizations are slow dishes, but once they’re ready, they announce themselves as suddenly as an oven timer. Grandfather had helped. Slava was visiting one rainy evening. Dinner had been finished, the dishes had been cleared by the home nurse, the conversation had dwindled. Grandmother was resting. Grandfather sat sideways in one of the dining room chairs, his palm on his forehead. Slava watched him from the folds of a love seat. His mind drifted to the next day’s chores, to the story idea on deck.
Grandfather opened his palm as if making a point to someone else in the room, and said, “What, is it too late for him to become a businessman? It’s not too late. Not late at all.” He flicked his wrist. Not late at all.
To be around Grandfather, Grandfather’s neighbors, the whole accursed neighborhood of Russians, Belarusians, Ukrainians, Moldovans, Georgians, and Uzbeks — Slava should do it if he wanted to write for a Russian newspaper, of which there were many now in the neighborhood. If he wanted to live among those who said “we don’t go to America,” except for the DMV and Brodvei. If he wanted to shop at marts that sold birch-leafed switches to whip yourself in the steam bath and rare Turkish shampoos that reversed baldness, but not Century. If he wanted to have his arm gently broken by an ex-paratrooper so he could claim it happened on ice outside Key Food and get disability. If he wanted to go out with Sveta Beyn, practitioner of high finance, who had just bought a nine-hundred-square-foot apartment, with balcony. Bought. (In truth, it had been bought by her parents, who took the liberty of decorating as well — lacquer, rococo, pictures of Mama and Papa.)
But if Slava wished to become an American, to strip from his writing the pollution that refilled it every time he returned to the swamp broth of Soviet Brooklyn, if Slava Gelman — immigrant, baby barbarian, the forking road spread-eagled before him — wished to write for Century, he would have to get away. Dialyze himself, like Grandmother’s kidneys.
He stopped visiting, stopped calling, left someone else to pass the nights by Grandmother’s gurney as the machines cleaned her liver. It wasn’t like she could tell, most of the time. In his Manhattan exile, which failed to supply the publication he had expected immediately, Slava would think about her. With his fork over a plate of kasha; staring at the river that separated Manhattan from Queens; as he drifted to sleep.
This was the price of weathering the divide between there and here, he told himself. The facts were old, tiresome, well known: This immigrant changed his name on the way to success in America. This one abandoned his religion. And this one temporarily parted from his family, big crisis. Slava wasn’t leaving to study the human condition from a shack in the woods. He was going to Century—legendary, secretive Century, older than The New Yorker and, despite a recent decline, forever a paragon. No, Slava wasn’t being paid what Igor Kraz was paid for proctology, but he wasn’t palming shit-slathered tubes all day long, either. Century had published the first report from Budapest in 1956. It had been the first to take the abstract expressionists seriously. It had nailed Ivan Boesky and saved Van Cortlandt Park. This had meant nothing to any Gelman — all right. (It was the Honda of American magazines, he had tried to explain, the Versace, the Sony.) But educated, discerning people the whole country over — three million of them, the last count had come down from Subscriptions — regarded Century as Slava’s mother regarded the English queen: with awe, piety, and savage curiosity. Slava wasn’t writing there, but the Gelmans didn’t need to know that; they never bought the magazine anyway. On the sly, Slava would become a writer for Century—success was success, was it not, even if you subbed literature for proctology; he had hardly planned it this way — and then they would see. There was cost, but there would be reward.
Two days before his grandmother died, a stroke of dumb luck — it wasn’t dumb luck, it was Arianna Bock in the next cubicle sprinkling her fairy dust — had assigned him an article for Century after he had spent three years uselessly trying to achieve same on his own. He had spent Grandmother’s last day on earth watching an “urban explorer” climb up the Ulysses S. Grant tomb in Morningside Heights. It was a sodden gimmick — everyone in this impossible city had their thing, and this was this man’s — but Slava had teased from the moment a grand essay about politics, continents, love. It was why he had awakened so poorly on Sunday — he had been writing it most of Saturday night while she — knowingly? unknowingly? — marked her last hours. There were no guarantees, but a byline in Century? Only a byline in The New Yorker meant as much. Entire book contracts were given out on the basis of a byline in Century. It was finally happening. Only he hadn’t made it in time.