The Funeral Party

TEN

People didn’t so much disperse as melt away. A few stayed behind to sleep on the carpet. One of those on the carpet that night was Nina; this night was Valentina’s.

Alik fell asleep as soon as the guests left, and Valentina curled up at his feet. She could have slept there, but as though to spite her, sleep didn’t come; she had noticed that alcohol had lately had the strange effect of driving it out.

She had arrived in New York in November 1981. She was twenty-eight, 165 centimetres tall, and weighed 85 kilograms. She didn’t reckon in pounds then. She was wearing a black hand-woven wool-embroidered shirt from the Gutsul region of the Ukraine. In her cheap cloth suitcase she carried her completed dissertation, of no possible use to her now, a complete holiday costume as worn by a Vologda peasant woman from the late nineteenth century, and three Antonov apples which she was forbidden to import, and whose powerful smell emanated from her feeble case. The apples were intended for her American husband, who for some reason wasn’t there to meet her.

A week earlier she had bought her ticket for New York and had called to tell him she was coming. He seemed happy and promised to meet her. Their marriage was a fictitious one, but they were true friends. Mickey had lived for a year in Russia, collecting material on the Soviet cinema of the thirties and enduring a neurasthenic love affair with a little monster who humiliated and robbed him and put him through a hell of jealousy. He had met Valentina at Moscow’s fashionable philology school. She had taken him back to her place, given him valerian drops to drink, fed him Russian dumplings and finally heard the shattering confession of a homosexual crushed by the incontrovertibility of his own nature. Mickey was tall and delicate-looking. He wept and poured out his anguish to her, keeping up a running psychoanalytical commentary all the while. Her heart melted, and she marvelled at the capriciousness of nature. During a brief respite in his two-hour monologue she asked him: “So you’ve never been with a woman then?”

It proved not quite so simple: when he was fourteen, his seventeen-year-old cousin from Connecticut had stayed in their house for a month and a half and had tormented him with her caresses, finally abandoning him in a state of exhausting virginity and indelible sinfulness.

This emotional tale, crammed with relevant details, seemed a little too literary to Valentina, and by the time it was over she was exhausted. Laying his hands firmly on her fine nipples, she raped him without any great difficulty and to his complete satisfaction. It remained the only such occasion in his life, but from then on their relationship assumed an unusual warmth and intimacy.

Valentina was experiencing her own emotional crisis at the time, having just been stunningly betrayed by the man she loved. He was a well-known dissident who had survived a stint in prison, and was widely regarded as a hero of irreproachable honesty and courage. But there was evidently a joint running between his upper and lower halves: the upper half was exemplary, the lower was vicious. With women he was insatiable and promiscuous, and he used all of them. His departure from Russia was mourned by many beautiful girlfriends of the most extreme anti-Soviet persuasion, and the lives of at least two illegitimate children would have to be sustained only by heroic legends about their father.

He had married an Italian beauty and left Russia in a blaze of glory, abandoning Valentina with her KGB “tail” and her unsubmitted dissertation. Big-hearted Mickey proposed a fictitious liaison, so they got married. For decorum’s sake they held the wedding in Kaluga, where Valentina’s mother lived, and from that day on she was reconciled with her daughter. She didn’t like her husband and referred to him privately as “the tapeworm.” But his American passport worked its charm even on her; at the print-works where she had worked all her life as a cleaner, no one had yet married their daughter to an American.

After waiting two hours for her husband at Kennedy airport, Valentina finally called his home. There was no answer, so she decided to go to the address he had given her. She asked some friendly Americans the way, and they explained that the place wasn’t in New York at all but in the suburbs. (She had picked up a few bits and pieces of English but they didn’t amount to much.) More or less knowing what she was doing, she set off for the address she had written down.

A sense of the complete unreality of what was happening freed her from normal human anxieties. However the future worked out, it was bound to be better than the past: behind her everything was cursed.

With these happy thoughts she boarded the bus. For some reason nobody took her money. She wondered if this was what the “land of the free” meant and was glad she didn’t have to pay; she had fifty dollars on her, and she would have to hold on to them if she was to track down her errant husband.

The sun was setting when after several small adventures and large impressions she got out at Tarrytown. She breathed in the evening air and sat down on a yellow bench at the bus station. She hadn’t slept for over thirty-six hours, everything was moving about in front of her eyes and her head was spinning from a sense of weightlessness and uncertainty.

After sitting there for ten minutes she picked up her case, walked out into a little square lined with parked cars, and asked a young man fiddling with the lock of his vehicle how to find the street she wanted. Without saying a word, he flung open the passenger door and drove her up a hill to a pretty two-storey house surrounded by well-tended shrubs. The light was fading. She stopped in front of a pair of white slatted gates.

Rachel, Mickey’s mother, had been bothered all morning by a wonderful dream she had had before waking. In it she had come upon a white wooden summer-house which didn’t exist in their garden, where a sweet, plump little girl had talked to her about something very important and pleasant, even though she was only tiny and in real life small children don’t talk like that. What she had said, however, Rachel couldn’t remember.

During the day she had lain down for a nap and tried to summon back the airy summer-house and the plump child, so that she could finish the important matter she had been talking about. But the little girl didn’t reappear, and there was no point expecting her to, since Rachel never dreamed during the day.

Now she waddled to the gates, a simple-faced Jewish woman with round eyes ringed by years of insomnia, and she saw a girl standing outside with a checked cloth suitcase. She let her in.

“Good evening, may I speak to Mickey?” the girl asked.

“Mickey?” Rachel was surprised. “He doesn’t live here, he lives in Manhattan. He left for California yesterday anyway.”

Valentina put her case on the ground. “How strange, he said he would meet me.”

“Ah, that’s Mickey!” Rachel waved an arm. “Where are you from?”

“From Moscow.”

As Valentina stood against the white gates, Rachel suddenly realized that the summer-house in her dream must be these gates, and that the plump child was this plump girl. “My God, my parents were from Warsaw!” she exclaimed happily, as though Warsaw and Moscow were adjacent streets. “Come on in!”

A few minutes later Valentina was sitting at a low table in the living-room, looking out at a sloping garden whose trees bent their heads in the gathering darkness towards the brightly lit window. On the table stood two delicate unglazed cups as thin as paper, and a rough terracotta teapot; there were biscuits that resembled seaweed, and pink triangular nuts with a fine shell. Rachel put her hands on her stomach in the same peasant pose as Valentina’s mother, tilted her head in its green silk turban to one side, and looked at her with kindly interest. It turned out that the Russian woman knew Polish, so they talked in Polish together, which gave Rachel great satisfaction.

“You’ve come here on holiday or to work?” she finally put the all-important question.

“I’ve come for good. Mickey promised to meet me and help me find work,” Valentina sighed.

“You met him in Moscow?” Rachel asked, tipping her head to the other shoulder: she had this funny habit of tilting her head from side to side.

Valentina thought hard for a moment; she was so tired that having a worldly conversation in Polish, let alone embellishing it a little, suddenly seemed beyond her strength. “The truth is, we got married.”

The blood rushed to Rachel’s face. Jumping up, she ran out of the room. “David, David! Come quick!” her voice rang through the house.

David, her husband, tall and thin like Mickey, stood at the top of the stairs in a red shirt and black skullcap, holding a thick fountain-pen in his hand, peering at her with a questioning look but saying nothing.

They were a fine pair, Mickey’s parents. Each discovered in the other what they lacked in themselves, and they rejoiced at the discovery. Several years ago, having reached the limits of human closeness, they were approaching their sixties and looking forward to a long and happy old age, when they learned to their horror that their only son had turned away from the laws of his sex and had deviated into such heathen wickedness that Rachel couldn’t even find a name for it.

“We were happy, too happy,” she muttered through the sleepless nights in the huge marriage bed in which they hadn’t touched each other since their terrible discovery. “Lord, make him a normal person again!”

The popular psychology books explained to her in clear and simple words that there was nothing unusual about her son, everything was fine, and a humane society must grant him his sacred and inalienable right to his own predilections. But this was no comfort to Rachel’s old-fashioned soul. A Jewish girl, saved from the fire and gas by the nuns, who for almost three years during the occupation had hidden her in their convent, she reached the point of turning to the mother of that God in whom she mustn’t believe, but did believe nonetheless, and praying to her in Polish: “Holy Mother, do this for him, make him …”

As her husband came down the stairs to her now and saw her happy face, he guessed the happiness that had befallen her.

But this happiness was fictitious: Valentina was sitting in the living-room struggling to keep her tired eyes open. This was how her life in America began.

Alik stirred slightly.

Valentina started up. “What is it, Alik?”

“Drink.”

She brought the cup to his lips. He sipped and coughed. She lifted him up and tapped his back; he was as light as the puppet Anka Kron had given him. “There now, let’s get your tube.”

He took more water into his mouth and coughed again. This had been happening a lot recently. Valentina moved him again and tapped his back. She gave him the tube, and again he coughed, longer this time, and couldn’t clear his throat. She wet a flannel and put it in his mouth. His lips were dry and slightly cracked.

“Shall I rub something on your lips?” she asked.

“On no account, I hate grease. Give me your finger instead.”

She put her finger between his dry lips and he moved his tongue over it. It was the only touch left to him now; it looked as though this would be the last night they made love. They both thought about it.

“I shall die an adulterer,” he said quietly.

Valentina’s life had been exceptionally difficult in those early years. She generally went straight from work to her classes. But one day she had had to go home early after her landlady called asking her to bring the keys because something was wrong with the front door, Valentina didn’t understand exactly what. She gave the landlady her key, but this didn’t work either. Leaving the landlady with the broken lock, she decided to get something to eat at Katz’s, the Jewish delicatessen on the corner, before she went on to her class. The prices at Katz’s were reasonable, and the corned beef and turkey sandwiches were superb. The burly staff, who looked as if they could handle concrete slabs, sliced the fragrant meat artistically with their large knives and chatted in their local dialect. The place was rather full, and there was a queue at the counter. The man standing in front of Valentina with his back to her spoke affably to the salesman: “Listen, Misha, ten years I’ve been coming here. You and Aron, you’re twice as fat and the sandwiches are half as thick. Why is that?”

Flashing his bare hands, Aron winked at Valentina: “You think he’s dropping me a hint?”

The man in front of Valentina turned to look at her. He had a stiff red pony-tail tied in a rubber band, his freckled face was laughing, his red moustache bristled cheerfully. “He thinks it’s a hint. It’s not a hint, it’s the riddle of life!”

Misha speared a gherkin on to a fork, then another, and laid them beside the succulent sandwich on a cardboard plate. “Here’s an extra pickle for you, Alik.” He turned to Valentina. “He says he’s an artist but I know he’s from the consumer rights department back home. They follow me even here. You want pastrami?”

Valentina nodded. Misha flashed his knife. The man with the red moustache sat down at a nearby table where another place had become free and took Valentina’s paper plate from her hands, putting it on the table and pushing a chair back for her with his foot. She sat down silently.

“You’re from Moscow?” he said.

She nodded.

“Been here long?”

“A month and a half.”

“I thought so, you haven’t the seasoned look yet.” His expression was direct and good-natured. “What do you do?”

“Babysitting, classes, you know.”

“Excellent!” he said. “You’ve found your feet quickly.”

Valentina pulled apart the two halves of her sandwich.

“No, no! What are you doing? No one eats like that! Americans won’t stand for it, it’s sacred! Just open your mouth wide and make sure you don’t spill the ketchup.” He bit neatly around the bulging edge of his sandwich. “Life’s very simple here. They don’t have many rules, but you have to know what they are.”

“Rules?” asked Valentina, obediently putting back the two halves of her sandwich.

“That’s the first one. The second is to smile.” He smiled at her with his mouth full of sandwich.

“And the third?”

“What’s your name?”

“Valentina.”

“Mm,” he murmured, “Valechka.”

“Valentina,” she corrected him. She had always hated the name Valechka, ever since childhood.

“Right, Valentina, maybe we don’t know each other that well yet, but never mind, I’ll tell you. The second Newtonian law formulates itself thus: smile, but cover your arse.”

Valentina laughed, and ketchup dripped onto her scarf.

“Then of course there’s the third,” Alik went on, wiping the ketchup off. “Start with the first two. These are the best sandwiches in America. That’s right, this eating-place is almost a hundred years old. Edgar Allan Poe came here—Jack London, O. Henry, they all bought sandwiches at this place for a dime. Americans don’t know these writers, by the way. Well, maybe they teach Poe in school. But if the owner here had read just one of them, he’d hang his portrait on the wall. That’s our American misfortune, our sandwiches are fine but there’s not enough culture. Although you can bet that the grandson of the first Katz graduated from Harvard—I don’t mean Adam but the first owner—and that his grandson studied in Paris at the Sorbonne and probably took part in the student revolution of 1968 …”

Valentina didn’t have the courage to ask which revolution he had in mind, but Alik put his sandwich down and went on: “The gherkins are pickled in the barrel, you don’t find ones like these anywhere else. They pickle them themselves. To be honest, I like them softer and more shrivelled, but they aren’t bad, at least they don’t use vinegar. This is a stunning city, it’s got everything. The city of cities, the Tower of Babel! But it’s worth it, my God it’s worth it!” He seemed not to be speaking to her, but arguing with someone who wasn’t there.

“But it’s so dirty and depressing and there are so many black people here,” Valentina said softly.

“You come from Russia, and you think America’s dirty? That’s a good one! And the black people, they’re New York’s finest decoration! You don’t like music? What’s America without music! And it’s black music, black music!” He was hurt and angry. “You know nothing at all about it, so you’d better shut up!”

They finished eating and went outside. At the door of the café he asked, “Where are you going?”

“To Washington Square, I’m doing classes there.”

“English?”

She nodded. “Advanced.”

“I’ll walk you there. I live just a few blocks away. Go up to Astor Place and turn the corner,” he waved an arm, “that’s where the punks hang out. They’re amazing, all in black leather and way-out metal. American punks have nothing in common with the English ones, and their music is something else too. Near the square is the old Ukrainian quarter—it’s not that interesting. Oh, and there’s an amazing Irish pub, a real one. They don’t even let women in. Well, they probably do now, but there are no ladies’ toilets, only urinals. This isn’t a city, it’s a huge living street theatre. For years I haven’t been able to tear myself away from it.”

They walked through the Bowery. He stopped her by one of the grey, gloomy buildings which seemed to fill this neighbourhood. “Look, that’s CBGB, the most important place for music in the world. In a hundred years people will hoard scraps of plaster from these walls in gold boxes. I mean it. A new culture is being born here. The Knitting Factory is the same. Geniuses play here every night.”

A skinny black boy in a pink-and-white coat jumped out of a peeling doorway. Alik greeted him.

“What did I tell you? That’s Booby the flute player. Every evening he plays with God. I’ve just been here buying tickets for his concert. My wife won’t come with me, she doesn’t like this kind of music. Would you come with me?”

“I can only manage Sundays,” Valentina replied. “Every other day I’m busy from eight in the morning until eleven at night.”

“I see, hard to get,” Alik grinned.

“Well, that’s how it is—I’m at work by nine, I finish at six, at seven I have classes, then next day I babysit my landlady’s granddaughter. At eleven I’m free, at twelve I go to sleep. Three hours later I wake up, and that’s it. I have this American insomnia, God knows what it is. At three in the morning I’m like one of those dolls that never falls over. I’ve tried going to bed later but it makes no difference, after three I can’t get back to sleep.”

“Well, there are no concerts at that time, but there are plenty of places where things go on till morning. It doesn’t matter when we go, three’s okay.”

Nina was a serious alcoholic by then and her needs were very simple. During the day she drank half a bottle of Russian vodka diluted with American juice, by one in the morning she was sleeping the sleep of the just. Alik would carry her from the armchair to the bedroom and would sleep beside her for a few hours. He was one of those people who don’t need much sleep, like Napoleon.

Alik’s affair with Valentina was conducted between the hours of three and eight. It didn’t start at once but gradually. Two months passed before he finally entered the basement room which Rachel had found for her in the house of one of her friends.

For the first two months he would visit twice a week at three in the morning. Stooping, he would whistle down to her dimly lit window. Ten minutes later she would hop out, pink and healthy in her black Gutsul shirt, and they would go to one of those night places which were rarely frequented by emigrés.

During one of the coldest nights of January, when the snow had lain on the ground for almost the whole week, they ended up at the fish market. Two steps from Wall Street teemed the most incredible life. Ships docked at the harbour from all over the world, and fishermen would hump their live, or, on this occasion, frozen wares on their backs, on carts and in baskets. The wide doors in the walls of the warehouses burst open to receive these marine riches. Two solidly built men bore on their shoulders a miraculous log of silver tuna, covered in a thin film of ice. On the stalls were arranged ordinary, unexceptional little mongrel fish, but the eye was drawn to the profusion of amazing sea monsters, with terrible eyes, claws and suckers. There were fish which seemed to consist entirely of mouths, and a large number of fantastic-looking shellfish, with their thin slivers of meat inside. There were snake-like animals with sweet faces that reminded one of mermaids; there were intermediate life-forms, part animal, part plant; and there was unambiguous seaweed, layered and trailing like vines. In the white light of the lamps the colours merged in a swirl of blue, red, green and pink. Some creatures still stirred, some had already stiffened.

In the alleyways stood several iron braziers with flames licking from them, and from time to time freezing people would hurry over to warm themselves there. The people here were as marvellous as their wares: Norwegians with auburn beards streaked by hoar-frost, whiskered Chinese, island people with ancient, exotic faces. Pushing through them were wholesalers from all over New York and New Jersey drawn by the low prices, as well as cooks and owners of the best restaurants, drawn by the fresh goods.

“It’s like a fairy-story!” Valentina laughed, and Alik was happy to have found someone who was as crazy about it as he was.

“What did I tell you?” He pulled her into a café to drink whiskey, because it was essential to drink in this freezing weather. The owner greeted him, of course.

“He’s my friend. Look over here,” he jabbed a finger at the wall, where beside the prints of yachts and ships and the photos of people Valentina didn’t know hung a small painting depicting two insignificant fish: a reddish one with a spiky, wide-open fin, a greyish one like a herring. “For that picture Robert said I could drink on the house for the rest of my life.”

Sure enough, the bald, red-faced patron was already handing them two whiskies.

There was a large crowd of sailors, loaders and traders here. It was a man’s place, with no women present. The men drank and ate the café’s fish soup, but the food wasn’t the point. They came not to eat but to drink, rest and get warm. The cold was exceptional for New Yorkers; they didn’t seem to understand, the way true northerners do, that you don’t keep warm by putting on a fur coat over a thin shirt, stuffing two pairs of nylon socks inside rubber boots and sticking a baseball cap on your head.

“Drink up quick, or we’ll miss the best bit,” Alik hurried Valentina up.

They went out to the street again. During the half-hour they had been inside, everything had changed at cartoon speed. The stalls had been cleared away, the doors of the warehouses had closed and turned back into solid walls, the braziers with the cheerful flames had gone, and a posse of tall lads walked down from the direction of the harbour hosing the scraps of fish off the ground. Fifteen minutes later Alik and Valentina stood almost alone on this promontory on the southernmost tip of Manhattan, and the whole night spectacle seemed like a dream.

“Okay, let’s go and drink some more,” Alik said. He took her to a diner empty of people. The tables sparkled with cleanliness. A young boy, the owner’s son, had just finished mopping the floor. He too nodded at Alik.

“This isn’t all either. In exactly fifteen minutes we’ll see the final act.”

In exactly fifteen minutes the nearby subway spewed out a crowd of elegantly dressed men and coiffed women, wearing good shoes, smart suits and this season’s perfumes.

“Mother of God, where are they off to, a party?” Valentina gasped.

“They’re clerks and secretaries mostly, they work in Wall Street. A lot of them live in Hoboken, another fascinating place I’ll show you one day. They’re not that rich, they make about sixty to a hundred thousand a year. White-collar workers, the most slavish breed.”

They walked to the station, because it was time for Valentina to go to work. She looked around, but where the fish market had been there was just a faint smell of fish, which you had to sniff hard to catch.

As well as the fish market were the meat and flower markets. In the flower market you could get lost among the tubs with trees; it opened at night and went on throughout the day. Outside the meat market they once met a red-haired man with a familiar face. Alik exchanged a couple of words with him, then they walked on.

“Who was that?”

“Didn’t you recognize him? That was Brodsky, he lives near here.”

“The living Brodsky?” Valentina asked in surprise.

It truly was the living Brodsky.

They also visited a dance club, with a unique clientele of rich elderly ladies and decrepit gentlemen, mothballed lovers of the tango, the foxtrot and the Boston waltz.

Sometimes they just walked. Then one night they kissed, and after that they almost stopped walking. Alik would whistle from the street, and Valentina would open the door.

For a while Valentina moved into Mickey’s apartment after he left to teach for several years at a well-known film school in California. His personal life changed for the better, although Rachel still grieved that instead of sweet, plump Valentina whose large breasts could have fed as many grandchildren as you could wish for, Mickey’s lover was a little Spanish professor who specialized in the works of García Lorca.

Mickey’s apartment was downtown, and Alik would visit Valentina there, still between the sacred hours of three and eight.

There was a time when she refused his visits. She had moved to Queens, where she had been hired by the college there to teach Russian. In Queens she had another man, also from Russia; no one had seen him, they only knew that he worked as a truck-driver. It was unclear how long the truck-driver lasted in Valentina’s life, but when after stiff competition she got a proper American job teaching in one of the New York universities, he was no longer on the scene and Alik was back again. This time she knew it was for ever, and that no one would leave anyone, neither Valentina Alik, nor Alik Nina.