The Funeral Party (16 page)

The gallery-owners groaned in ecstasy. “The best costume design in the history of time,” one whispered to the other. “It’s gorgeous. Alik always had stunning taste. If he’d gone into fashion we’d have had a designer of genius, rather than a passable artist.”

“She’s a remarkable model,” agreed the other. “I noticed her three years ago.”

“She’s old now,” the other said sadly.

Fima’s pale-blue work shirt had symmetrical spots of sweat under the armpits. On his bare feet he wore sandals. As he led Nina in, he experienced sharply contradictory feelings of pity for the poor woman and revulsion for the role he was forced to play; he had little taste for amateur dramatics, and collecting the money for the funeral during the past two days had cost him a lot of bad blood already. Since Alik’s death she could remember only that he had got better, and that he was no longer alive. These two concepts would be unable to coexist in normal human consciousness, but in her little head, set brightly on its long neck, everything had changed place like a pattern rearranging itself behind the glass screen of a kaleidoscope, and now the pieces lay in a pleasing new order, separate and in no way interfering with one another.

The words “death,” “he has died” and “funeral” rang constantly in her ears, but they didn’t penetrate this invisible screen; there was no place for them in the new pattern which had formed in her mind.

Why had they brought her here? It had to do with Alik. Alik loved her to be beautifully dressed, and she had prepared
herself carefully, giving much thought to this outfit she was wearing for him now.

She walked on through the crowd of people without recognizing any of them. In her left hand she held to her chest a small black lacquered purse resembling a three-layered bagel. In her right she clasped the thick stalks of some lilies, which trailed their haughty white-and-green heads along the hem of her transparent coat.

The throng parted before her and the doors of the hall swung open. Without slowing her pace, she walked on. Behind her everyone followed in a widening triangle. There were far more people than were usually accommodated in this hall, and most of them carried flowers.

At the end of the hall stood the catafalque, and on top of this was a large open white box shaped like an eau-de-cologne bottle. Inside the box lay a vividly made-up doll looking like a red-haired teenager, with a small face and a little moustache.

A man resembling an ageing television newscaster was already opening his mouth as Nina swept past. Clearly displeased at being upstaged by this extravagant widow, he stepped back.

Lifting her veil, she leaned over the coffin and gazed at the badly sculpted puppet, made from some terrible, unrecognizable material, and she smiled a small smile of recognition: this was instead of Alik, she decided.

She raised her head, and the gallery-owners standing next to her noticed a single black line carefully drawn down the center of her face, from the part in her hair through her neck and disappearing into her low-cut dress.

“What class!” whispered one.

“Ladies and gentlemen!” intoned the newscaster.

It was a literal, word-for-word translation of the usual
graveyard routine repeated beside the crematorium ovens by the fat lady in provincial black crimplene suit on the other side of the ocean.

The coffin was customarily driven to the grave in the hearse by the attendants. But the plot was in such a crowded part of the cemetery that they had to carry it, stepping on other people’s graves as they went. Some thirty metres from the plot, the path stopped abruptly leaving a strip of earth a foot or so wide. The men walked ahead and formed a chain up to the excavated grave, and the white canoe sailed on, swaying perilously over their heads as it passed from hand to hand to its last resting-place.

Nina stood by the pedestal of someone else’s gravestone, next to the fresh pit, where the earth had been neatly piled up in pink baskets. The powerful August sun drove a light breeze from the ocean, tugging at the black toile of her outfit and ruffling her faded-precious hair like a sail.

Irina stood in the middle of the crowd. She had said goodbye to Alik a long time ago. Now something else tugged at her: she had found a father for her child. She hadn’t had much to do with it in fact, they had found each other. She just had to put cash into it—rather a lot of cash, which she wouldn’t get back. The grave too had cost quite a bit. But her little girl had had a beloved father, and this was his grave. Irina grinned: she had forgiven him for everything, but she hadn’t forgotten. She had given birth to her daughter in a paupers’ hospital while he was making love to Nina or that other heifer, Valentina, standing beside her now but half a step behind, knowing her place. Irina could never decide if Valentina was a devious bitch or just a good lay. How spiteful I’ve become, she thought. Alik, Alik, everything should have been different … But it hadn’t been, and that was all right.

In this secluded part of the cemetery by the fence were numerous vertical gravestones; each horizontal was surrounded by vertical relatives, as though standing on one leg. The square, angular inscriptions giving the place of birth bore memories of clay slab and reed pen, all mixed up with a funny, gothically accented English, as though the stones carried in them the tastes of these long-gone people.

Alik’s closed coffin rested on the adjacent grave. Robins, who had hurried up to honour his unusual client with his presence, commanded the diggers with a conductorly flourish to lower it down. Valentina whispered something to Nina, who opened her lacquered purse and removed the packet of earth. Moving her lips, she scattered the earth over the coffin in pinches, as though putting salt in soup. The gravediggers leaned on their spades.

“Wait, wait!” came a shriek. Behind the mourners’ backs there was a sudden commotion. After much pushing and scuffling Gottlieb finally burst through, followed by a large number of bearded Jews, around ten in all. The party was rather late; they had poured out of their bus and had instantly got lost, since each had his own idea of where the cemetery office was. Now, pulling on their prayer shawls and phylacteries, treading on the women’s toes and pushing aside the men, they uttered the first words of the
Kaddish:
“May his great name be magnified and sanctified in the world that is to be created anew, where he will quicken the dead, and raise them up unto life eternal …” They chanted in their sad, shrill voices, although almost no one but Robins knew the meaning of their ancient lamentations.

“Where did these ancient Hebrews come from?” Valentina asked Libin.

“What do you mean? Gottlieb brought them.”

What they didn’t realize was that Reb Menashe had decided to take on himself the care of this poor “captive child.”

The suspicion dawned on Valentina that the Jews were a little too theatrical; maybe they were from one of the small theatres in Brighton Beach. We must ask Alik, she thought, and instantly realized what a multitude of things she had nobody to ask about now.

The funeral prayers were said, it didn’t take long. Then the people at the front stepped back from the grave, and the ones at the back trickled forward. The mountain of flowers grew until they reached Nina’s waist, and she stroked each flower, making a strange little house or mausoleum of them and smiling, so that people were now reminded of an ageing Ophelia.

Everyone began to move away. The Jews pulled their prayer shawls off their black, sun-charred suits. They were now at the back, but Nina waited for them and invited them back to the wake. The oldest of them, whose skullcap was attached to his bald head with sticking-plaster, raised two withered hands to his face and spread his yellow fingers, saying sadly: “My child, Jews don’t sit and eat after a funeral, we sit on the earth and fast. Although it’s very good to drink a glass of vodka too.”

They walked back across the cemetery in their steaming black suits and climbed into their minibus, on which were emblazoned the words “Temple of Zion” in dark-blue letters on the white.

Maika, Lyuda and Gioia hadn’t gone to the funeral. Maika was busy hanging Alik’s paintings. She pulled out the old ones, brushed off two years of dust and wondered where to put them. All at once, like a kitten on the seventh day, her eyes opened and she could see them clearly: this one here, that one next to it, that one above it, take that one away … Nothing had to be decided, she had only to look at them and they arranged themselves beautifully and intelligently for her.

“I’m going to study art,” she decided, forgetting that she had already dedicated herself to Tibet last week.

The paintings she liked best were the small and medium-sized ones, but one large work begged to be displayed on the end wall. She called Gioia and Lyuda over to give her a hand, and they hung up the three-metre canvas which for five years had stood with its face to the wall. There was a lot going on in the picture, possibly too much: an autumn party with grapes,
pears and pomegranates, dancing women and children, jugs of wine, distant hills, a man walking under an awning …

Lyuda sliced cheese and sausage and made salads. Gioia dreamily laid out special dishes of quasi home-made Russian-Jewish food from the emigré grocer: herring, pies, meat in aspic, the salad known by Russians as Olivier salad and by everyone else as Russian salad.

The guests arrived all at once and in a large crowd; the service lift bore them up in three shifts. About fifty people sat around the table, made from boards and various bits of timber; the rest took their plates and glasses and wandered around like guests at an American cocktail party. It seemed strange that this concentration of people could produce such a feeling of emptiness.

The Washington gallery-owners were also present. They walked around the studio as though at an exhibition, examining the paintings with a dissatisfied air. Ten minutes later, before the drinking started, they kissed Nina’s hand and took their leave.

Irina watched them go without pleasure. They still hadn’t given Alik his money or returned his paintings; she would definitely have to proceed with her lawsuit against them.

Faika turned out to be one of those experts on ritual who are invariably to be found at weddings and funerals. She poured a glass of vodka, covered it with a piece of black bread and set it on a plate. “For Alik!” she cried.

This was how things were supposed to be done.

At the table people murmured expectantly; there were no loud conversations or splashes of separate voices, just a monotone hum and the jingle of glasses. They poured the vodka.

At that moment Maika appeared at the door. She was
pale, with a swollen mouth and pink nostrils, and she was wearing a black teeshirt with an orange-yellow inscription. Her sweaty hand gripped the plastic box in her pocket; now it was time for her to take it out.

Nina perched on the arm of the white armchair, although no one was sitting in it. Fima stood, raised his glass and started to say something.

“Listen everyone!” Maika broke in.

Irina froze: she could expect anything from her strange little girl, but not a speech.

“Listen everyone! Alik asked me to give you this!”

Everyone turned to look at her; her face was crimson, like reagent paper during a chemical reaction. Next minute she squatted on her heels and pushed a tape into the cassette-player which stood on the floor. Almost immediately, without a pause, Alik’s clear, high voice rang out: “Boys and girls! My Pussy-cats and Cuckoos!”

Nina gripped the arm of her chair. Alik’s voice went on: “I’m right here with you! Pour the vodka! Let’s drink and eat, like we always do!”

In this simple, mechanical way he had broken down the eternal wall which separated him from them, casting a pebble from that other mist-covered shore and slipping away from it for a moment, stretching out a hand to those he had loved without recourse to the crude magic of necromancers or mediums, moving tables or restless plates.

“There’s just one thing I beg you, no fucking tears, okay? Everything’s fine, just as it should be!”

Gioia sobbed loudly. Nina sat as though turned to stone, her eyes bulging. The women, ignoring Alik’s request, simultaneously burst into tears, and a few of the men allowed themselves
to join in. Fima took from his pocket the checked rag he used as a handkerchief.

It was as if Alik could see them: “What’s wrong with you people? No tears, I said! Drink up! Mud in your eye! Nina, drink to me! Teeshirt, stop the tape a moment, darling!”

There was a pause. Maika didn’t press the button immediately, only after Alik’s voice rang out again: “Drink up! That’s better!”

She wound the tape back.

They drank standing up, without touching glasses, and the vast emptiness which comes after death receded a little and was filled by a sort of deception, but to their surprise it was filled nonetheless.

Irina leaned against the door-frame. She had already done all her weeping for Alik, yet something still tugged at her. What had been so special about him? Was it that he had loved everyone? But how had that love showed itself? Had he been a good artist? But surely if you didn’t sell, it meant you were no good? He had been an artist in his life perhaps; yes, he had lived as an artist. So why hadn’t she lived as an artist? Why had she pushed boulders uphill, overcome all obstacles and earned a pile of money? Because you weren’t with me my friend, she thought. Where were you?