A Replacement Life Read Online Free PDF

supermarket. (Finally, she moved Slava to price tags and took cutting out for herself.) An adult in a child—she had been thin as a steeple, her face blue with pallor, as if life had breathed into her only once—Vera was serious, like Slava’s grandmother. Verochka, Verusha—everyone called her by diminutives as if to rub out the age from her name. Ve-ra: the lips shy, then exhaling in wonder. Vera—a wife’s name.
    But Slava could not find that girl in the person who sat across from him, his first sighting in a decade. Little Vera Rudinsky, studious stork, had been replaced by a bronco with long nails and wild hair, the eyes of a hunter for a husband in the Russian classifieds (as Mama looked over her shoulder), though underneath the thick layer of blush on her face, Slava could still make out the unexpectedly felicitous result of Garik and Lyuba Rudinsky, two penguins, mixing genes on some Crimean beach a quarter century earlier.
    Slava closed his eyes. The area behind his chest noised like a beehive. He wanted to go home. He would curl into the blanket and this terrible day would come to an end. And tomorrow, when his story about the explorer came up for judging, maybe there would be good news. He opened his eyes and saw Vera again. Her transformation was so macabre that he could not take his eyes from her.
    Grandfather rose, a small glass in his hand. A moment passed before everyone noticed. Berta burned holes in the foreheads of three Slav neighbors from the floor. The Jews are having a funeral, and you morons are hollering like degenerates. Probably Grandfather had thought it rude not to invite them.
    Finally, the table grew quiet. Televisions from the neighboring apartments howled through the cardboard walls, the wailing heroine of a telenovela mixing with some kind of program about the Russian civil war. “In the name of the Revolution,” a wintry voice said, “I am seizing this train.”
    “Some of you may know,” Grandfather said, “twenty-five years ago by now, we were in a car accident. A blue day, blue as . . . I don’t know.” He pointed weakly at Uncle Pasha’s blazer, a bruised blue with white stripes. Grandfather’s free hand moved around the tablecloth, looking for invisible crumbs. “This was in Crimea. She lost a lot of blood, so they gave her a transfusion. Bad blood, as it turned out. Everything that came out of there was bad. It was a ticking bomb you don’t know it’s inside you. Cirrhosis. Well, at least she managed to make it out of there. But, what, it’s better that her headstone is in a language she didn’t know?”
    Berta laid a puffy hand on Grandfather’s wrist. “I know,” he said. “I know. And look—she spoke English. She did. When we had to study for the citizenship . . .” He turned to Slava. “Slavchik, tell it.”
    A table of eyes and half-turned bodies regarded Slava with practiced amusement. He had told this story before. He nodded. “To become a citizen,” he said. He coughed and straightened. He was going to try. “You have to agree to defend the country. No matter your age. It’s called:‘bearing arms.’”
    People nodded, smiled cautiously.
    “I was thirteen or fourteen,” he went on. He sneaked a glance at Vera. She observed him dutifully but gave no sign of seeing anything other than another table loaded with smoked salmon, fried potatoes, and brightly colored bottles, another meaningless feast, though she would attend them to the last of her days without objection. Slava cursed himself. Vera also he had expected to remain as she was when he left her? He ridiculed his naïveté. Then inspected the lurid creation across the table once more, setting up the small laugh at the end of his story with her in mind. “But I had the best English, so I practiced with her for the interview. ‘Grandmother, will you bear arms for the United States of America?’ She’d make a fist, pump it in the air like Lenin, and shout ‘Yes!’”
    The table broke