The Funeral Party (15 page)

Her first night in New York passed in a dream. Ray lived in a tiny apartment in the Village with his friend, a graceful young man who opened the door to her in a lady’s swimsuit. They proved to be extraordinarily good young men and did everything they could to help her. Later, Ray admitted that he had had no memory of her, and wasn’t even sure if he had been in Prague.

Butane—Irina wasn’t sure if this was the flatmate’s surname, his first name or a nickname—had already lived illegally in America for five years, so her insane step didn’t seem so insane to them. They had no work or money at the time, and no idea how they were going to pay the rent. Next morning they paid it with Irina’s money, then they all set off to perform for the summer visitors in Central Park. Here too, according to them, Irina brought them luck. For the next few days she contorted her body on a mat, then she sewed five cloth puppets, which she put on her hands, feet and head, and their earnings became entirely satisfactory. Irina slept modestly on three sofa cushions in the room next to Ray’s, trying not to inhibit his sexual freedom. But before long Butane started getting close to her and Ray grew jealous. For a while their triple alliance
hung in the balance. Irina still went out to work with them, but she realized she must find another way of living here. They were great boys though, and completely reconciled her to casting off her old skin: it turned out that half of America was made up of people like her.

Then one August day, having finished her solo act by the entrance to the small zoo at Central Park, she suddenly found herself in the arms of Alik, who for the last twenty minutes had been watching the happy play of her double-jointed limbs.

Half an hour later she was sitting with him in his loft, which hadn’t been partitioned into separate rooms then. He had lived for two years in America and was working hard and selling respectably. He was happy and independent, emigration suited him. He looked at this small, fast-moving animal with the impetuous human face, and he realized what had been missing from his life.

Seven years had passed since they parted in Moscow, seven wasted years, and they had to make up for them as quickly as possible in gestures, words and feelings. Twenty-four hours a day weren’t enough for them; everything was as transparent as glass, they didn’t feel the ground under their feet.

One night as they were returning home they had found a large white carpet left outside some rich person’s house. They dragged it up to the apartment and Irina would sit on it in her habitual lotus position holding her English textbook in front of her, studying her grammar, while Alik worked away on his pomegranates. His loft was full of them: pink, crimson and brown, squishy and rotten, or the shrivelled corpses sucked dry of the burning juice.

In Alik’s pictures of this time the pomegranates appeared singly, in pairs or in groups, with different elongations and
foreshortenings. It almost seemed as though in producing these simple changes he might reveal new, undiscovered numbers within the known numerical sequence—between seven and eight, say.

Irina lived for eighty-eight days in Alik’s studio. They ate, talked, made love, took warm showers—that summer too had been hot, and the pipes had heated—and everything was happiness, or rather the beginning of happiness, because it was impossible to imagine that it would ever end. Scott Joplin’s compositions spilled through the night air.

Irina’s lips swelled with softness: she knew immediately that she was pregnant, her whole body from her head to her feet was filled with a new physical happiness. Alik didn’t know; if he had, he might have acted differently. As it was, he was awaiting the arrival of Nina. He had divorced her before he left Russia, although he wasn’t sure if this had been a joke or for real. Since her father would never give her permission to leave while he was alive, Alik had decided to go alone. His departure tipped Nina over the edge of her quiet madness, and she had tried to kill herself (it was her second suicide attempt). She sat in the hospital making endless telephone calls and finally found a phoney American who was prepared to marry her, after which she applied to live with him permanently in America; such documents often involved years of running around.

Irina and Alik were sitting in the loft one evening. Alik took a knife and sliced a large red watermelon in two. It fell apart and the telephone rang. It was Nina, announcing that she had received permission to leave and had bought her ticket.

“Well, I don’t really see how I can get out of it now,” Alik said, putting down the phone.

For Irina the whole thing came as a total surprise.

“She can’t survive without me, she’s so weak,” Alik explained.

Irina was strong. Hadn’t she walked on her hands to the edge of the roof? She wasn’t afraid of bosses or the authorities. He proposed renting a room for her with some friends of his on Staten Island, while he thought of a way to extricate himself from the whole crazy mess. He hadn’t reckoned on Irina’s pride, which had grown no less in the years they had been apart. A week before Nina arrived, when everything had been arranged with his friends, she left Alik’s apartment, as she thought for ever.

Irina came out of the café and stood on the street, wondering what to do next; she must go home, Teeshirt was probably there already.

Just then a van with an air-conditioner on the roof drove up to the doorway of Alik’s building and parked under the “No Standing At Any Time” sign. Two young men in uniforms jumped out, followed by a third man resembling a bald Charlie Chaplin, who minced after them with a suitcase.

“The corpse-carrier,” Irina thought. “I’m going home.”

Fima met the undertakers. Some stage management was required. He nodded to Valentina: “Keep Nina in the studio.”

But Nina wasn’t going anywhere; she sat in the battered
armchair and muttered enigmatically, mentioning herbs, Alik’s character and God’s will.

The two sturdy young men and their puny boss shut themselves in the bedroom with Fima; it was sad that Alik couldn’t laugh at this comical trio, he thought.

As they were running through the funeral arrangements, the two young men pulled from the suitcase a large black plastic bag, like the rubbish bags that line the streets every evening, and with three deft movements they slipped Alik inside as though putting shopping in a carrier bag. Charlie Chaplin stood watching.

“Stop, wait a minute,” Fima said. “I don’t want his wife to see.”

He went to the studio, pulled the unresisting Nina from her chair and carried her into the kitchen. Holding her gently against him, he brushed his unshaven cheek against her long neck, etched with tiny wrinkles, and said: “Well Bunny rabbit, what can I get you? Shall I run out for some grass?”

“No, I don’t want to smoke, I want another drink.”

He clasped her wrist and held it for a moment.

“Do you want me to give you an injection? A nice little injection?” He stood barring the kitchen door with his broad back, trying to decide on the best cocktail to knock her out and disconnect her for a bit. As he did so the undertakers carried out the black bag, as though taking out the rubbish.

Irina was already heading for the subway as the workers opened the boot of the van and pushed the black bag inside.

Fima gave Nina an injection, and soon her eyes closed and she slept until morning on the same orange sheet from which they had just removed her husband. It was strange, but she didn’t once ask where he was, she merely smiled tenderly
from time to time before falling asleep, and said, “You never listen to me, I told you he would get better.”

People kept coming. Some didn’t know he had died, and had just come over to visit. A number of his friends arrived, including several from outside the city’s Russian-Jewish community. There was an Italian singer, one of Alik’s friends from Rome, and the owner of the café opposite, who brought Nina a cheque as he had promised. Libin, in accordance with Russian tradition, collected money. Some people from Moscow came, one with a letter for Alik, another saying he was an old friend. Some street people whom nobody knew turned up. The telephone rang, with calls from Paris and Yaroslavl.

Father Victor, when he learned of Alik’s deathbed baptism, gesticulated in the air, shook his head and then said that everything was God’s will. What else could an honourable Orthodox man say?

That morning, the day before the funeral, he picked Nina up in his old motorcar and drove her to the empty church—there were no services that day—and performed a funeral service for the dead man in his absence, who had been baptized virtually in his absence too.

In a low, resonant voice the priest chanted the best of all words, invented for just this eventuality. Nina shone with angelic beauty. Valentina stood holding a candle behind her in a dusty shaft of light from the ceiling window, and absolved herself for having loved this other woman’s husband.

As the last echoes of Father Victor’s voice died away in the dust-filled air, Valentina took from his hands a square packet containing some earth, a white ribbon with a prayer, and a small reproduction of an icon to put in the coffin. Then she grasped Nina’s trembling arm and pushed her into a taxi.
Nina inclined her small head as she got into the battered yellow jalopy, as though it were a Rolls-Royce taking her to a reception at Buckingham Palace. This little bird has landed on my head, Valentina sighed. Lord, did I really hate her for so many years?

The owners of Robins the Undertakers—formerly the Rabinoviches—had broken with traditional Jewish inflexibility in favour of a more humane and commercially justified tolerance. In the last fifty years the Jewish Funeral Society had become simply a funeral parlour, with four separate halls in which the sometimes exotic ceremonies of the different religions could take place. Only last week Mr Robins had put up a film-screen in one of these halls in the presence of the dead man, who had asked for a three-hour film of his concert performances to be shown to his relatives and friends before the funeral. (He was a tap-dancer.)

The scenario for Alik’s funeral was comparatively simple: no religious service had been requested and no gravestone ordered, even though Robins owned a decent granite workshop. The mourners had, however, paid for a place in the more expensive Jewish part of the cemetery. It was a crappy plot, admittedly, right up against the wall, with no path running to it.

The ceremony had been arranged for three o’clock. By ten to three, the lobby in front of the hall was packed with people. The present Mr Robins, the fourth incumbent of this thriving family concern which had never experienced recession, was a handsome old man with a Levantine appearance. He was intrigued. He believed the mourners at the ceremony could tell one everything about the deceased, and he found this psychological game one of the most attractive features of his profession. This time he had difficulty in determining the client’s property status or even his nationality, indicated unambiguously, it would seem, by the family’s desire to bury him in the Jewish part of the cemetery.

The crowd included several black people, rarely to be seen at Jewish funerals. To judge from their clothes they were from the artistic world. The face of one old man looked familiar, and Robins had the idea he was a well-known saxophonist; he couldn’t put a name to him but he had seen his face on TV and in magazines. Also present were a group of South American Indians. The white guests too were a complete mixture: solid Jewish couples, some superb Anglo-Saxons, evidently wealthy gallery-owners, and numerous Russians, respectable citizens and out-and-out scoundrels, who were also evidently rather drunk. A fourth-generation American, Robins had his roots in Russia, but along with the language he had long ago dropped his romantic attachment to this dangerous country and its crazy people.

A most unusual client, Robins thought, he must be a musician; he had even made a detour across the funeral building to take a look at him.

At exactly three o’clock Nina appeared in the doorway of the building, accompanied by Fima. Everyone took a deep breath, and let it out again. Her renowned gold and silver hair
fell to either side from beneath a black silk hat with a wide veil. Above her short black dress she had thrown an ankle-length coat of translucent black toile. Her shoes were huge, seventies-style platforms with faceted heels.