Kozlovich peered at him. “I have one double left on Tulip,” he said finally.
Grandfather spread his hands. “Meant to be.” From the pocket of his overcoat, which now revealed its purpose, he extracted a Tupperware encasing a snail of hundred-dollar bills. Whispering under their breath, the three mourners counted to 150—once, again, and a third time. Grandfather had not brought a bill more.
When they emerged from the office, Grandfather threaded his arm through Slava’s and spat. “Homos. If you’re going to Europe already, who goes to Madrid?” He looked as if he’d swallowed spoiled milk. “Paris, Slava. Don’t be a discount aristocrat. Let’s walk.”
2
The funeral service was conducted by a Borsalino-hatted, bearded whisperer in Orthodox garb who remarked unspecifically, but in Russian and with key references to sections of the Torah that no one in the audience had read, on the passage of Grandmother’s life.
Against the rabbi’s gentle reproaches—“We Jews try to remember the person as living,” he murmured apologetically into his cuff — the coffin had been left open. In it, Grandmother looked unpersuaded of death. Dressed in a long blue nightshirt, her face diplomatic and cautious, she looked as if snoring politely through an afternoon nap. At the rim of the coffin, Slava stifled back tears, the line of mourners humming behind him. Then Uncle Pasha was at his ear, followed by the sweetish scent of used cognac. “You need to keep it together for the sake of the women,” Pasha whispered with sympathetic reproach.
When it was her turn, Slava’s mother fainted. Fixed to his seat, Slava watched several men lift her from the ground. A female guest he didn’t know — feathered mauve hat, a veil falling from the brim — waved a bottle of salts, and she revived with a gasp.
Afterward, by themselves in the car, his father mute behind the wheel and Grandfather staring wetly at the broad emptiness of Ocean Parkway, Mother turned from the front passenger seat and, as if sighting Slava for the first time that day, colored. She’d had to handle by herself both these men, one petulant and the other mute, and he thought he could just appear? Her eyes blazed; she looked as if she wanted to strike him. He wished she would. Instead, a gust of something corrective swept her face clean, and again she looked loving. She lunged toward Slava and began to wail into his shoulder from the front seat, two souls bereaved but together.
Mother had taken from Grandmother the condiments without the meal. She clung to Slava but knew not why and did not ask. Grandmother clung because her previous family had been taken without asking. This one she would hold to faster than iron — with this one, she would make sure to die first, in the natural order. (“It is a blessing to die in the natural order.”—Sofia Gelman.) The mother clung because the grandmother clung. When Slava stopped showing up, it was only his mother who dialed from New Jersey, badgering and pleading. Grandmother couldn’t, Grandfather was too proud, and Slava’s father had been made docile by his parents-in-law, though he kicked the television once because why did these people control their lives.
At the cemetery, each of the remaining Gelmans shoveled a spadeful of dirt onto the grave, the rabbi chanting a selection in Hebrew that concluded with Grandfather slipping him a white envelope, whereupon God’s messenger vanished into the blurry heat of the evening. The Gelmans stood in front of the pit in a suddenly terrible silence split only by the distant rush of an airplane nosing its way through the atmosphere. Mother and Grandfather grasped each other, two shipwrecks on an island. Slava and his father bracketed them without words.
Berta conveyed her condolences the only way that she could. Two foldout tables in Grandfather’s living room heaved with plates rimmed in gold filigree: duck with prunes; pickled watermelon; potato pancakes with dill, garlic, and farmer cheese. A dropped fork or a glass emptied of Berta’s trademark cranberry water sent her bulleting into the kitchen with startling litheness. The table droned with the sound of grief mixed with fatigue.
“A woman like her you don’t meet nowadays. Fierce as a—”
“Berta, this soup…”
“… but mark my words, there wasn’t a false bone—”
Slava used to sit at one of these tables once a week, the cooking by a Berta or a Marina or a Tatiana, uniformly ambrosial, as if they all attended the same Soviet Culinary School No. 1. Stout women, preparing to grow outward even if they hadn’t reached thirty, in tights decorated with polka dots or rainbow splotches, the breasts falling from their sailor shirts, their shirts studded with rhinestones, their shirts that said Gabbana & Dulce.
Stewed eggplant; chicken steaks in egg batter; marinated peppers with buckwheat honey; herring under potatoes, beets, carrots, and mayonnaise; bow-tie pasta with kasha, caramelized onions, and garlic; ponchiki with mixed-fruit preserves; pickled cabbage; pickled eggplant; meat in aspic; beet salad with garlic and mayonnaise; kidney beans with walnuts; kharcho and solyanka; fried cauliflower; whitefish under stewed carrots; salmon soup; kidney beans with the walnuts swapped out for caramelized onions; sour cabbage with beef; pea soup with corn; vermicelli and fried onions.
On the phone, Grandfather would want to know when Slava would come visit, but when Slava was there at last, the old man would tiptoe off to the television, Grandmother scowling at him. Then she, too, would become tired and, making apologies, shuffle off to bed, her house shoes scraping the parquet. Slava was left with the home attendant. As the day declined and Grandfather made faces at the television, they would compare notes on his grandparents.
“Slava?” Mother said now from the other side of the table. “You’re all right?” The skin under her eyes was inflamed.
“Yes,” he nodded. “Of course.”
“What are you thinking about?”
“Nothing.”
“I wonder if someone will say a toast,” she said resentfully.
Slava surveyed the table. Grandfather’s call-around had netted all the significant relatives. Uncle Pasha and Aunt Viv; the girls from the pharmacy where his mother worked; the Schneyersons; Benya Zeltzer and clan.
Even two Rudinskys. The Rudinskys held a special place in Grandfather’s catalog of wayward relations. The Gelmans and Rudinskys had come through immigration together, had been assigned to the same guesthaus in Austria, where their documents were processed, and down the block from each other in Italy, where they were processed some more. Vera Rudinsky and Slava Gelman had played supermarket together. They cut cucumbers out of green construction paper, raised a crop of goose bumps on the skin with black marker, and sold them to their parents for prices just below those of the real vegetable market on Via Tessera. Their parents and grandparents laughed, counting out lira, and when the children were gone to restock the shelves of V&S Alimenti, they made jokes about all the money their children would make in America, followed by wordless glances that said: Together? Maybe together.
Money works both ways. After arriving in America, Vera’s father had asked Grandfather for a loan to invest in a limo fleet. Grandfather didn’t like to part with money unless he could count on interest, and he couldn’t bring himself to ask that of the Rudinskys, who had shared with the Gelmans months of stateless dread amid the perverse beauty of Mitteleuropa and the Tyrrhenian seashore. The Rudinskys retreated. No scenes; they just called less and less. Grandfather refused to call until called.