The Funeral Party

ELEVEN

Lyuda, an engineer from Moscow, had been brought to the apartment the day before, had spent the night on the carpet and stayed. In the morning, the quietest time of the day, when those with jobs had left, those on benefits hadn’t opened their eyes, and Nina hadn’t shaken off her orange-juice dream, this unprepossessing, unmemorable woman washed yesterday’s cups and glasses then looked in on Alik. He was already awake.

“I’m Lyuda, from Moscow,” she repeated to be on the safe side; she had been introduced to him yesterday, but she was used to people not remembering her name.

“A long time?” Alik was instantly awake.

“Six days. It seems like a long time. Shall I wash you?” She asked this lightly as though her main activity were to wash the sick every morning. She took a wet towel and wiped his face, neck and hands.

“So what’s new in Moscow?” Alik asked mechanically.

“Nothing changes. Twaddle on the radio, the shops are empty, what’s new. You want breakfast?”

“Well, let’s try.”

Eating was difficult for him. For the last two weeks he had eaten only baby food, and he had trouble getting even this fruity mush down him.

“I’ll make you some potato puree.” Lyuda was already in the kitchen, rattling plates and saucepans.

The puree was thin and slipped down easily. Alik felt better this morning: the light wasn’t so blurred, and his vision was clearer and didn’t play tricks on him.

Lyuda plumped up his pillows, and thought sadly that it seemed to be her fate to bury everyone. In forty-five years she had buried her mother, her father, two grandmothers, her grandfather, her first husband, and only recently a close girlfriend. She fed them and washed them all, then she washed their bodies. This one wasn’t even hers, someone had brought her to him.

She had a mass of things to do, a long list of items to buy and strangers to visit, people who wanted to question her about their Moscow relatives and tell her about their lives, but she already felt part of this ridiculous household; it was as if she couldn’t tear herself away from this man she was beginning to love, and her heart would break again in exactly the same place.

The telephone rang. She picked it up, and someone shouted down the line: “Turn on CNN! There’s a coup in Moscow!”

“There’s a coup in Moscow,” Lyuda said in a faltering voice. “That’s something new for you.”

Scattered fragments of a news bulletin flashed across the television screen. Some kind of civil emergency, ugly thuggish faces, thick-voiced, with corruption written all over them, like ill-fitting false teeth.

“Where do they find these ugly mugs?” Alik wondered aloud.

“And the ones here are any better?” Lyuda burst out with unexpected patriotism.

“Yes they are,” Alik thought a little. “Of course they’re better. They’re all crooks here too of course, but at least they’re ashamed. Those ones have no shame.”

It was impossible to make sense of what was happening. Gorbachev apparently had a health problem.

“They’ve probably killed him by now,” Alik said.

The telephone rang incessantly. An event like this was impossible to keep to oneself.

Lyuda moved the television to make it easier for Alik to see.

Her ticket was for 6 September. She must change it immediately and go back. Go back to what, though? Her son was here, her husband would do better to join them. But what could they do here, without the language, without anything? At home they had their books and their friends, a thousand dear people. Now all of them were swept up in this transient cloud on the screen.

“I said something would happen before that treaty was signed,” said Alik with satisfaction.

“What treaty?” said Lyuda, who didn’t follow politics because they repelled her.

“Wake Nina up,” Alik begged her.

But Nina was already creeping into the bedroom.

“Mark my words, everything is being decided now,” said Alik prophetically.

“What’s being decided?” Nina was flustered and still halfasleep; all events outside the apartment were equally remote to her.

By evening a mass of people had gathered again. The television was carried from the bedroom and put on the floor of the studio, and everyone surged away from Alik and crowded around it. Something incomprehensible was happening: a twitching marionette popped up, a bathhouse superintendent, a moustached man with a face like a dog, half-devils, half-people, phantasmagoria from the dream sequence in Evgeny Onegin, and the tanks. Troops were entering Moscow. Huge tanks were sliding through the streets of the city, and it was unclear who was fighting whom.

Lyuda clutched her temples and groaned: “What’s happening? What will happen next?”

Her son, a young computer-programmer, had got off early from work and was sitting next to her a little embarrassed. “What will happen? There’ll be a military dictatorship of course.”

They tried to get through to Moscow, but all the lines were busy. No doubt tens of thousands of people were dialling Moscow numbers all at the same time.

“Look, look, the tanks are passing our building!”

The tanks were moving down the Garden ring road now.

“What are you crying about? Your son’s here, you’ll stay and that’s that,” Faika tried to console Lyuda.

“Father probably retired long ago,” Nina said irrelevantly.

Only Alik understood the relevance of this remark: Nina’s father was a dedicated, high-ranking KGB man who had renounced her when she left Russia, and had forbidden her mother to write to her.

“To hell with it, the regime’s a bitch and all the vodka’s gone!” Libin jumped up and ran to the lift.

Gioia, who read Russian quite well but whose understanding of the spoken language was poor, suddenly found her ears opening in these hours and each word spoken by the announcer she caught on the wing. She was one of those people who, without ever visiting it, fall in love with a foreign country and know it from old books, and in bad translations at that. Now, by some unexpected inspiration, she understood everything in the announcer’s script. Rudy the painter gawped at the screen and fidgeted, tugging at her elbow and demanding a translation.

What was going on in Moscow was so hard to understand that it seemed as if everyone needed a translation.

People forgot about Alik for a while, and he closed his eyes. The events on the screen moved before him like flashing spots. By evening he was tired, but his mind was still clear.

Maika sat beside him on the arm of the easy chair, and stroked his shoulder. “Will there be a war in Russia?” she asked him quietly.

“War? I don’t think so. Unhappy country.”

Maika wrinkled her forehead. “I’ve already heard that. Poor, rich, developed, backward, okay. But unhappy country? I don’t get it.”

“You’re clever, Teeshirt, you know that?” Alik looked at her with astonishment and satisfaction, and that she understood.

All the people sitting here who had been born in Russia differed in their gifts, their education and human qualities, but they were united by the single act of leaving it. The majority had emigrated legally, some were non-returnees, the most audacious of them ran away across the borders. Yet however their life in emigration had worked out, however much their views differed, they had this one thing in common: this crossed frontier, this crossed, stumbling lifeline, this tearing up of old roots and putting down of new ones in new earth, with its new colours, smells and structures.

As the years went by, even their bodies changed their composition: the molecules of the New World entered their blood and replaced everything old from home. Their reactions, their behaviour and their way of thinking gradually altered, but the one thing they still needed was some proof of the correctness of what they had done. The more complicated and insurmountable the difficulties they faced in America, the more necessary this proof was for them. Consciously or not, the news from Moscow about the growing stupidity, lack of talent and criminality of life there during these years provided the proof they needed. But none could have imagined that what was happening in that far-off place which they had all but erased from their lives would be so painful for them now. It turned out that this country sat in their souls, their guts, and that whatever they thought about it—and they all thought different things—their links with it were unbreakable. It was like some chemical reaction in the blood, something nauseating, bitter and terrible.

For a long time Russia had existed for them only in their dreams. They all dreamed the same dream, but with different variations. Alik had once collected and recorded these dreams in an exercise-book which he called “An Émigré’s Dream-book.” The basic structure of the dream was as follows: they arrived back to find themselves in a closed building, or a building without doors, or a rubbish-container; or something happened that made it impossible for them to return to America: losing documents or being sent to prison, for instance; one Jew had even seen his dead mother, who had tied him up with a rope.

Alik had had an amusing variant of the dream. He was back in Moscow, everything was bright and beautiful, and his old friends were celebrating his return in a large flat, which was familiar yet dreadfully neglected. This friendly scrum of people then accompanied him to Sheremetevo airport, but it was nothing like the heart-rending farewells of past years when everything was for ever, until death. When the time came for him to board the plane, his old friend Sasha Nolikov suddenly appeared and pushed some dogs’ leads into his hand. On the end of them a pack of variously coloured little mongrels jumped about, with husky blood in their veins and with curly tails like pretzels. Sasha disappeared and all of Alik’s friends departed, leaving him alone with the dogs. There was nobody he could give them to, and the check-in for New York was already closing. Then an airline official came to tell him the plane was in the air, and he stayed with the dogs in Moscow knowing that this was for ever. He worried only about how Nina would pay the rent on their Manhattan studio, and in his dream he could smell the lift, the loft, the unavoidable odour of rough tobacco …

“Tell me, Alik, was life so bad there?” Maika again touched his shoulder.

“Silly, we had an excellent life. But life’s excellent for me wherever I am.”

It was true: Alik lived in Manhattan as he had lived in Moscow’s Trubnaya Street or Ligovka, or in any of his long-stay or three-day addresses. He quickly made himself at home in new places, exploring their side-streets and dark spaces, their beautiful and perilous angles, like the body of a new lover.

In the years of his youth everything had whirled past him at great speed. But later, with his heightened attentiveness and memory, he found that nothing had been forgotten: he could recall the patterns of the wallpaper in every room he had lived in, the faces of the shopkeepers in all the local bakeries, the shape of the mouldings on the façade of the building opposite, the profile of a pike caught on a rod in Pleshcheevo lake in 1969, the lyre-shaped pine tree with one broken point rising over the pioneer camp in Verya where he used to spend his summers as a child. As if in gratitude for the memory, the world opened itself up to him. He went to Cape Cod, swollen from the rains, and a trembling sun poked through the clouds. He walked past an apple tree, and as though waiting for this moment, an apple dropped at his feet as a present. His life had a charmed quality which extended even to the world of technology: when he dialled a number on the telephone, the line was always free. It became a little trick of his: people who knew about it would sometimes ask him to dial a constantly engaged number. He would sometimes refuse for hours before suddenly seizing his moment and immediately getting through.

America returned his admiration with friendship. The newness of the New World took his breath away. It seemed new to him in the most literal sense of the word: even the oldest, many-ringed trees seemed to be made from newer, stronger material. Here everything was solid, firm, crude. Alik, a man of the third, Russian world, had by the age of thirty known both America and Europe. At first Vienna and Rome, the sweetness of Italy, under whose spell he had lived for almost a year. Only when he went to America and had lived there for several years did he understand the American envy of Old Europe, with its cultural subtlety, its worn, even worn-out, transparency, and also Europe’s disdainful, but fundamentally envious, attitude to broad-shouldered, elemental America.

Alik, with his bristling ginger moustache and his hair tied at that time in a long, wiry ponytail, stood between these two worlds like a judge, and they couldn’t have had a fairer one. He was not distinguished by impartiality; on the contrary he was unbelievably, passionately partial. He worshipped the highways of America, the patchwork crowds of New York’s subway, which he considered the most beautiful in the world, the American street food and street music. Yet he also loved the small round fountains in the squares of Aix-en-Provence marking a delicate transition between France and Italy; he loved Romanesque architecture, and rejoiced whenever he came across remnants of it; he loved the filigree shores of the Greek islands, shaped like the leaves of maples and birches; he loved medieval Germany, which kept promising to reveal itself in Marburg or Nuremberg but never did, because everything that wasn’t on the streets was to be found in the country’s stunning museums, and German art totally eclipsed the Italian Renaissance. And German beer was excellent too.

He never felt the need to take one side, he stood on his own side, and in this place he loved both equally.

He muttered to Teeshirt a brief and it seemed to him insignificant remark about America and Europe, and he felt sad that he had become stupid and couldn’t talk persuasively or coherently any more.

Maika listened thoughtfully, and said: “Do you like Russia, then?”

“Of course I do.”

“So what do you like about it?” she persevered.

“Just because,” he brushed her off.

Maika was cross; she hadn’t learnt to make allowances for his illness. “God, you’re just like the rest of them! Tell me properly, why? Everyone says things were terrible there.”

Alik considered this: the question really was far from simple. “Shall I tell you a secret?”

She nodded.

“Bring your ear closer.”

She leaned her ear to his mouth, almost closing it. “Nobody has the faintest idea why. The most intelligent people are just dissembling,” he said.

“Dis-what?”

“Pretending.”

“And you? Do you pretend?” Teeshirt said exultantly.

“I dissemble better than anyone else.”

Irina glanced enviously at them; they both looked extremely pleased with themselves.