A Replacement Life Quotes

“Tell me about the war,” he pressed cautiously. She smiled again and began, “Well . . .” The sentence ended there. Her tongue moved but no words emerged. He wanted to say, Tell me because I’d like to tell my grandchildren one day. Tell me because it happened to you, and so I should know. Tell me because it will bring me closer to you, and I want to be close to you. But he was fifteen years old, and he didn’t know how to express thoughts like these. He only knew that he wanted to know. He could tell that she would tell him anything but anything, only if he could stand it please don’t make her talk about that. And though he grasped how important it was for him to know— even if everyone in the family had acquiesced not to trouble Grandmother about it— he couldn’t bring himself to make her. So he said to her: “Forget about the war. Tell me about how you and Grandfather fell in love.”
― Boris Fishman, A Replacement Life

“Even though they, each for his own reason, did not wish to end the conversation, they had come to the end of what they could say in peace, and said goodbye.”
― Boris Fishman, A Replacement Life

“No one was dead, but her son would not call just to call. She’d had to enter intimate terms with this new understanding in her life, like an illness.”
― Boris Fishman, A Replacement Life

“He chortled at himself in disgusted amusement. Then noted that he had been communicating with himself at a more frequent rate.”
― Boris Fishman, A Replacement Life

“(“It is a blessing to die in the natural order.”—Sofia Gelman.)”
― Boris Fishman, A Replacement Life

“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.”
― Boris Fishman, A Replacement Life

“What does it take?” “What difference does it make?” Peter said. “You don’t like what I write, anyway.” Slava, confronted with the truth, said nothing. “There’s a style,” Peter said. “It’s not your style.” “I want it to be my style,” Slava said. “You don’t,” Peter said. “Otherwise, it would be.”
― Boris Fishman, A Replacement Life

“They stood looking down Brighton Beach Avenue, Arianna waiting for a signal from Slava. He glared at the doomed souls wandering past them, their legs varicose and bent, the jowls swimming in fat, bellies hung over the legs like overripe fruit. (Had Otto made his way down here, to see firsthand what he was dealing with in his folders, or did he prefer to keep his distance?) Yes, they weren’t easy to be near. The mesh bags stuffed with discount tomatoes, the lumbering bodies heedless of traffic lights, the threadbare emporia that had to traffic in furs and DVDs and manicures to squeeze from the stone of this life the blood of a dollar. And these were the honest ones. After fifty years of Soviet chatteldom, they had come here to get fucked in the ass for a little bit longer before packing off to a spot at Lincoln Cemetery, even this impossible to acquire without money being passed under the table. They never even voted.”
― Boris Fishman, A Replacement Life

“They stood looking down Brighton Beach Avenue, Arianna waiting for a signal from Slava. He glared at the doomed souls wandering past them, their legs varicose and bent, the jowls swimming in fat, bellies hung over the legs like overripe fruit. (Had Otto made his way down here, to see firsthand what he was dealing with in his folders, or did he prefer to keep his distance?) Yes, they weren’t easy to be near. The mesh bags stuffed with discount tomatoes, the lumbering bodies heedless of traffic lights, the threadbare emporia that had to traffic in furs and DVDs and manicures to squeeze from the stone of this life the blood of a dollar. And these were the honest ones. After fifty years of Soviet chatteldom, they had come here to get fucked in the ass for a little bit longer before packing off to a spot at Lincoln Cemetery, even this impossible to acquire without money being passed under the table.”
― Boris Fishman, A Replacement Life

“They were their parents’ and grandparents’ children. They did what they were told, parents or muggers, as they had been taught. Compliance with instructions—just say what the rules were—was as molecularly satisfying as a cool plum on a hot day. When he was little, the satisfaction of it reached to the part of Slava that burned when the tea he was drinking was too hot.”
― Boris Fishman, A Replacement Life

“He thought about doing what she had done that day several weeks before, when he had to leave for the library. Ask for five minutes, peel off her clothes, and push her down on the bed. She had shown him that you could impose on each other this way; the other would impose another time. Love was not equality but balance. On the bus ride back to his side of the borough, he had felt used but closer to her. However, he couldn’t imagine doing the same thing now. The doleful corollary to her rule was that this kind of imbalance was possible only when the rest was steady. It had been in their first week, but less so the more time they spent together, a dismal irony. He rose and got dressed.”
― Boris Fishman, A Replacement Life

“Slava had never had animals, but he liked the cat. In the moments when he and Arianna didn’t know how to be warm to each other, they could be warm to the animal.”
― Boris Fishman, A Replacement Life

“He never pays enough attention to anything for it to touch him.”
― Boris Fishman, A Replacement Life

“Before they began to see each other regularly, her eyes were filled with a smirking amusement, which irritated him—she was making fun of him, his nose buried in work. Belatedly, he understood that smirk to have been an expression of self-protection, because soon it gave way to tender excitement, even admiration. And periodically to worry, to a futile intent on restraint—the two of them were moving so quickly. It was different now. When Arianna’s freckled lids, the left with its divided birthmark, opened from sleep, they would gaze upon Slava with doubt and dread.”
― Boris Fishman, A Replacement Life

“Working at the pharmacy, you get the impression that there are no healthy people in the world. The normal condition is not health but illness.”
― Boris Fishman, A Replacement Life

“the left hand trembling in an eternal so-so.”
― Boris Fishman, A Replacement Life

“It’s got that silence of ours. That terrible Russian silence that the Americans don’t understand. They are always making noise because they need to forget life is going to end. But we remember, and so we have silence, even when we’re shouting and laughing.”
― Boris Fishman, A Replacement Life

“The bed was empty when he awoke. A note was taped to the bathroom mirror. “Did we? We should. XOXO.”
― Boris Fishman, A Replacement Life

“He dozed off only when the familiar dark blue started coming into the sky. His head teemed with strange pictures and sounds: a man washing himself from a well, his coarse shirt and suspenders hung over his legs; a gray military truck rumbling over a rutted country road; the high ping of a shot in the woods.”
― Boris Fishman, A Replacement Life

“Only weariness remained. It was a special kind of weariness that descended rarely, according to internal chemical regimens he did not understand. It made striving difficult, but also falsehood.”
― Boris Fishman, A Replacement Life

“At the wheel, Hamid Abdul was trying not to watch them. Hamid, his immigrant brother. How Slava was exceeding his immigrant brief with this fine-skinned American specimen. See Slava take the milk of this American skin into his mouth, Hamid. Look at her fingers disappear from your rearview mirror. We are miscegenating with the natives, Hamid, we are assimilating, are we not?”
― Boris Fishman, A Replacement Life

“The rehearsal of Grandfather’s arguments came with wondrous facility to Slava.”
― Boris Fishman, A Replacement Life

“Can’t I?” he said. “Did you know that they fertilized crops with human ash? After the war, the tomatoes were the size of an infant’s head.” He gave the words the same inflection that his grandfather did, only in English. They had a new but not unfamiliar sound on his tongue. He knew how to say them.”
― Boris Fishman, A Replacement Life

“They kissed slowly, the human traffic of First Avenue taking them into its indifferent arms, the city’s special combination of curiosity and resentment.”
― Boris Fishman, A Replacement Life

“They took a meandering route through the neighborhood, louche and gentrified all at once.”
― Boris Fishman, A Replacement Life

“She breathed heavily, like a figure skater just off the ice.”
― Boris Fishman, A Replacement Life

“It was the militsionery guarding him who were frightening. Slava had expected them to be young, crisp, and clean-skinned, but they were heavy men with slow, drunk eyes ringed by ripples of fat.”
― Boris Fishman, A Replacement Life

“Leaving Russia or not, it seemed heretical to visit the capital without visiting Grandfather Lenin, and only Slava’s grandfather resented having to waste time on “that dead dick.”
― Boris Fishman, A Replacement Life

“Even an iridescent pigeon at Slava’s feet—as a flying creature, arguably prone to curiosity about the gentleman invading its airspace—was more concerned with a triangle of pizza on the ground, approaching it as shyly as a girl at a dance.”
― Boris Fishman, A Replacement Life

“Now, in the conference room, he felt the familiar sensation of being in the presence of information obvious to all but himself.”
― Boris Fishman, A Replacement Life