The Funeral Party

SEVENTEEN

The past couldn’t be cancelled. Well, why would anyone want to cancel it, anyway.

Irina had done her last performance in Boston, and without going back to the hotel she had gone straight to the airport. There she bought herself a ticket, and two hours later she was in New York. The year was 1975. After paying for her ticket she had forty dollars left, which she had brought from Russia in the pocket of her trousers. It was a good thing she had, because the troupe had not been given any cash; they had been promised some money on their last day for shopping, but Irina couldn’t wait any longer.

As she sat in the plane, she looked at her watch and imagined the scandal that would break next morning. This evening the sweaty managers would rush through the sleazy boarding-house banging on doors and asking people when they had last seen her. There would be curses and anathemas, the head of personnel would get fired for sure. Her retired father would try to wriggle out of it and do deals, but her wise mother would be pleased. I’ll ring her tomorrow, Irina thought; I’ll tell her everything’s worked out brilliantly, there’s no need for her to worry.

In New York she called Pereira, the circus manager, who had promised to help her. He wasn’t in; it turned out that he had left town and forgotten to tell her. The other number she had on her belonged to Ray, a clown she had met three years earlier at a circus festival in Prague. He was at home. She explained to him with some difficulty who she was. Her name clearly meant nothing to him, but he invited her over.

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.