30 Quotes by Boris Fishman

She breathed heavily, like a figure skater just off the ice.

Now, in the conference room, he felt the familiar sensation of being in the presence of information obvious to all but himself.

What if I’d never left, like Oksana’s son, like the young man on the bus? Would I be married and a father by my early twenties, like most of the men here, or was my untraditional living – untraditional by Oksana’s judgment, at least – an intrinsic quality, and would it be my destiny anywhere? If the latter, what kind of outcast would it have made me in Minsk? Or would it have been rubbed out of me the way it had been rubbed out of my father?

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.

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.

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.

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.

They kissed slowly, the human traffic of First Avenue taking them into its indifferent arms, the city’s special combination of curiosity and resentment.

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.