The Funeral Party (3 page)

But the bottles didn’t go away: they stood there palely, like waving columns on the other side of his eyelids. He realized that this was important. The realization crept in slowly and hugely, like a loose cloud. Bottles, bottle rhythms. Music sounded. Scriabin’s light-music. This had turned out on closer study to be thin, mechanical rubbish. He had gone on to learn about optics and acoustics, but these hadn’t been the key to anything either. His still lifes weren’t bad, just utterly irrelevant: he hadn’t discovered the metaphysical still lifes of Morandi yet.

All those paintings had been blown away in the wind; none were left now apart from a few in Petersburg maybe, stored by his friends there, or by the Kazantsevs in Moscow. God, how they used to drink in those days. They had collected the bottles, taking back the ordinary empties, but the foreign ones and the old ones of coloured glass they kept.

The bottles standing on the tin flap which edged the roof of the Kazantsevs’ house in Moscow were Czech beer-bottles of dark glass. No one could remember who had put them up there. In the Kazantsevs’ kitchen was a low door leading up to the attic, and from the attic a window opened on to the roof. Irina once darted out of this window and ran across the roof. There was nothing unusual about this, they were forever running on to the roof to dance and sunbathe. This time she darted out and slid on her bottom down the pitch, and when she stood up two dark stains were clearly visible on the buttocks of her white jeans. She stood poised on the edge of the roof, his miraculous, light girl. God had sent them each other for their first love, and they were true and honest until the heavens rang.

Irina’s strict grandfather, who was from an old circus family, had banished her from the troupe after she ran off with Alik to Petersburg for a couple of days and missed a rehearsal. They had moved into the Kazantsevs’ attic together and lived there for the next three months, weak from the weight of their still growing feelings for each other.

On the day Irina ran across the roof they had had a visitor, a well-known writer of teenage fiction, a solid, grown-up man who brought two bottles of vodka with him. Irina liked him; she twitched her shoulders, lowered her eyelids, and when she spoke to him her voice was a little lower than usual.

“Why are you flirting like that?” Alik whispered. “It’s cheap. If you like him, go ahead.”

She really did like him.

“I didn’t really, not in that way,” she told Alik later. “Only a bit anyway.”

But at the time, angry at the cruel truth of his words, she had jumped out of the window, slid on her bottom to the edge of the roof and stood up to her full height beside the bottles. Then squatting down on her heels—only Alik could see what she was doing—she grasped the necks of the first two bottles and kicked up her legs. The sharp toes of her shoes froze against the spreading lilac of the sky. Those facing the window saw her hand-stand and fell silent.

The writer, who could see nothing, chuckled at himself as he recounted a story about a general who had his overcoat stolen. Alik took a step closer to the window. Irina was already walking on her hands over the bottles now. She grasped the necks with both hands, tore one hand away, felt for the next bottle and grasped that one, transferring the weight of her tensed body on to it. The writer’s bass voice rumbled on. Then, realizing that something was going on behind his back,
he stopped and looked around. His fleshy cheeks trembled; he couldn’t abide heights. The building was no more than one-and-a-half storeys—five metres high—but physiology is more powerful than arithmetic.

Alik’s hands were wet. The sweat dripped down his back. Nelka Kazantseva, their landlady and another wild woman, clattered down the wooden stairs and dashed out on to the street.

Slowly, the points of her shoes scratching the petrified sky, Irina reached the last bottle, tucked her legs under her, landed gracefully on her toes and slid down a rickety drainpipe.

Nelka was already standing outside. “Run! Run as fast as you can!” she yelled.

She had seen the expression on Alik’s face, and her reaction was swift.

Irina rushed towards Kropotkin Subway Station, but it was too late. Alik caught up with her, grabbed her by the hair and slapped her face.

They stayed together for two more years after that because they didn’t know how to finish it, but the best part had ended with that slap. Eventually they parted, unable to forgive or to stop loving each other. Their pride was diabolical: she had gone off with her writer that night and Alik hadn’t turned a hair.

It was Irina who finally made the break. She was taken on by a troupe of trapeze artists, a rival company, which made her grandfather curse her, and she spent the whole of that summer on tour with the big top. Alik then made his first attempt to emigrate: he moved to Petersburg.

He opened his eyes. He could still feel the heat coming
off the hot roof of the Kazantsevs’ shabby house in Afanasevsky Street, and his muscles seemed to twitch in response to his headlong flight down the wooden stairs. In his dream the memories seemed richer than in his memory itself, for he could make out details which had long been obliterated: their landlord’s cracked cup with the portrait of Karl Marx on it; the single aristocratic pure-white lock of hair on the dark head of the Kazantsevs’ ten-year-old son; the ring with the dead-green turquoise in the dark-blue enamel setting on Irina’s finger, which she had lost soon afterwards …

The sun was already setting over New Jersey, and the light slanted through the window on to Alik. He screwed up his eyes. Gioia was sitting on the bed beside him reading
The Divine Comedy.
She read in Italian at his request, inelegantly repeating each
terza
in English. Alik didn’t tell her that he knew Italian rather well: he had lived in Rome for almost a year, and that happy, glass-clinking language had imprinted itself effortlessly on his mind like a handprint in clay. But none of his gifts had any meaning now: he would be taking with him his tenacious memory, his fine musical ear, his skill as an artist, along with his ridiculous talents for yodelling and playing a strong game of billiards.

Valentina was massaging his bloodless leg, and it seemed to her that a little life was coming back into the muscles.

While he was in this state of sleepy oblivion, Arkasha Libin arrived with a new air-conditioner and a reasonably new girlfriend, Natasha. Libin was an admirer of ugly women of a particular type: petite, with large foreheads and tiny mouths.
“Libin is approaching perfection,” Alik had joked recently. “You’d have trouble fitting a teaspoon into Natasha’s mouth. He’ll have to feed the next one on spaghetti!”

Libin planned to remove the old broken air-conditioner and install the new one in a single day, and to do this alone, although even professionals generally worked in pairs. But Russian confidence is indomitable. Moving the bottles from the sill to the floor he took down the blinds, and the Latin-American music Alik so disliked instantly surged up from the street as if the window had been taken out. For two weeks now the block had been tormented by a band of six South American Indians who had picked this corner under his window to play their music.

“Can’t someone shut them up?” he asked quietly.

“It’s easier to shut you up,” replied Valentina, clapping a pair of earphones to his ears.

Gioia looked at Valentina indignantly, offended this time for Dante too.

Valentina put on a tape of a Scott Joplin rag for Alik. He had taught her to listen to this music during their secret nocturnal walks around the city.

“Thanks, Bunny.” He flickered his eyelids.

He called them all Pussy-cats and Bunnies. Most of them had arrived in this country with twenty kilograms of luggage and twenty words of English, leaving behind hundreds of ruptures large and small—with jobs, parents, streets and neighbourhoods. The rupture they were slowest to recognize was with their native language, which over the years became more and more instrumental and utilitarian. The new American language came to them gradually in their new emigré milieu and was also instrumental and primitive, and they expressed themselves in a terse, deliberately comical jargon, part-English, part-Russian,
part-Yiddish, which took in the most exotic criminal slang and the playful intonations of a Jewish anecdote.

“Oy, this isn’t music, it’s
koshmar,”
Valentina grumbled. “Be an angel and shut your window. Do they think only about eat and drink, and have fun and get the good mood? They make such
gevalt
we get all the headache.”

Gioia, offended, laid the red volume of her Florentine emigré on the bed and returned to her apartment next door. Small-mouthed Natasha brewed coffee in the kitchen. Valentina turned Alik on his side and rubbed his back; he had no bedsores so far. They didn’t reattach the urine-bag, for the plasters flamed his skin.

Sodden sheets piled up, which Faika collected and took to the laundry on the corner. Nina dreamed in a chair in the studio, glass in hand. Libin fussed unsuccessfully with the air-conditioner; he didn’t have the bracing slat he needed, and in the usual Russian way he was trying to make a short one out of two long ones so he wouldn’t have to go home for the tools he had forgotten to bring with him.

After a long retreat, the sun finally slipped down like a fifty-kopeck piece behind the bed, and a few minutes later it was night. Everyone left, and for the first time that week Nina had Alik to herself. Each time she went to him she was newly appalled. A few hours of alcohol-fortified sleep rested her soul: in sleep she blissfully forgot about this rare and peculiar disease which was draining the life from him with such terrible power, and every time she awoke she hoped that the spell would have passed and he would come to meet her with his usual “How are you doing, Bunny rabbit?”

But he didn’t.

She lay down beside him, covering his angular shoulder with her hair. He seemed to be asleep. His breathing was shallow and irregular. She listened closely. Without opening his eyes he said, “When will this damned heat end?”

She jumped up and ran to the corner of the room, where
Libin had arranged Maria Ignatevna’s herbal masterpieces in seven bottles on the floor. Taking the smallest one and removing the cork, she pushed it under Alik’s nose. It smelt of ammonia.

“Better? Is that better?” she asked urgently.

“A bit,” he agreed.

She lay down beside him again, turned his head to face her and whispered in his ear: “Alik, do it for me, please, I beg you.”

“Do what?” He didn’t understand, or pretended not to.

“Get baptized, and everything will be all right. And the medicine will work.” She took his weak hand in both of hers and gently kissed his freckled fingers. “And you won’t be afraid.”

“But I’m not afraid, my darling.”

“So I can fetch the priest?”

Alik focused his wandering gaze and said, unexpectedly seriously: “Nina, I have no objection to your Jesus. I quite like him in fact, although his sense of humour isn’t all it could be. The thing is, I’m a clever Jew myself. There’s something silly about these sacraments. It’s theatre, and I don’t like theatre. I prefer the cinema. Leave me alone, Bunny rabbit.”

Nina clasped her thin fingers together and waved them at him as though praying. “Please, won’t you just talk to him? Let him come, you can talk.”

“Let who come?” asked Alik.

“The priest of course. He’s a very, very good man. I’m begging you …” Slowly she licked Alik’s neck and his collarbone, then the nipple stuck to his ribcage, in a familiar inviting gesture they both understood. She was seducing him into baptism, turning it into an erotic game.

He smiled weakly at her. “Go on then, call your priest. Only on one condition: you must call a rabbi too.”

Nina was nonplussed. “Are you joking?”

“Why should I joke? If you want me to take this serious step I’ve the right to a second opinion.” Alik always knew how to derive the maximum pleasure from every situation.

But Nina was satisfied. “He agreed, he agreed!” she said to herself. “He’ll be baptized.”

Everything had been arranged in advance with the priest at Nina’s little Orthodox church. An educated man, descended from emigrés who had fled the 1917 revolution, Father Victor had a complicated life-story and a simple faith. He was a sociable, humorous character who liked to drink and was always happy to visit his parishioners.

Where rabbis were to be found, Nina had no idea. Their circle of Jewish friends had no connections with the religious community, and she would have to devote much effort to finding one if these were Alik’s terms.

For the next two hours she busied herself with her bottles, putting more compresses on Alik’s feet and rubbing his chest with an acrid-smelling infusion. It was three in the morning when she remembered Irina laughing as she told them she must be the only one of them who knew how to cook gefilte fish, because she had once been married to a proper Jew who kept kosher and the Sabbath and the rest of it.

She dialled Irina’s number.

When Irina received Nina’s call in the middle of the night, she froze; it’s over, she thought.