The Funeral Party

FOURTEEN

The ambulance arrived fifteen minutes later, and a skinny intellectual in glasses appeared with a robust young black man built like a basketball player, with a jutting jaw. He was the doctor; the other man was probably a runaway Pole or Czech, Fima decided, who also hadn’t managed to pass his American exams. He found the similarities unwelcome and unpleasant, and he walked to the window.

The doctor threw the sheet off Alik and passed his hands in front of his eyes. Alik didn’t respond. The doctor took his wrist, which drowned in his large hand like a pencil, and the sentence he uttered was long and incomprehensible. Fima guessed that he was talking about respirators and hospitalization, but he couldn’t make out if he was suggesting they take Alik or was refusing to take him.

Nina tossed her hair and declared in Russian that she wasn’t letting Alik go anywhere. The doctor peered at her exhausted beauty, then, lowering his remarkable lashes over his eyes, said, “I understand, Ma’am.”

Drawing three ampoules of liquid into a large syringe, he injected Alik between the skin and bone of his almost nonexistent thigh.

The man in glasses stopped writing, knitted his shaggy, long-suffering brows on his beaky face and said to the doctor in an accent which seemed even to Fima to be atrocious: “The lady’s in a bad way, we’d better give her a sedative or something, seeing as …”

The doctor pulled off his gloves, threw them in his case without looking at his assistant, and muttered a contemptuous remark. It tore Fima apart; he would have liked to do something to him. “Why am I sitting here like a prick? I’m not staying, I’m going back,” he thought for the first time in all these wretched years, and suddenly he felt afraid. Could he ever go back to being a real doctor? Would he be able to pass all those damned exams in Russian? Who would need them in Kharkov anyway, with his diploma?

As soon as the useless medical team had left, Nina became very agitated. Dashing to her bottles again, she sat at the bottom of Alik’s bed and poured oil into her palms, rubbing his feet, from the tips of his toes up his legs to his thighs.

She poured handful after handful from the bottle. “They understand nothing, Alik, nothing. No one understands anything, they don’t believe in anything. But I believe. Lord, I believe.” Splashes of oil flew around, spreading on the sheet as she rubbed his legs, his chest. “Alik, Alik, do something, say something. Damn the night, you’ll be better tomorrow, you’ll see.”

Alik said nothing, just took a few laboured, shuddering breaths.

“You lie down for a bit, Nina, and I’ll massage him, okay?” Fima said, and she agreed surprisingly easily. “Gioia’s keeping watch in the studio. She wanted to be on duty tonight. Maybe you could sleep on the carpet for a while and she could sit here?”

“Gioia can clear off, he doesn’t need anyone.” Nina lay down with her face by Alik’s feet, stretching across the wide bed in which he was already completely lost, and speaking to him: “We’ll go to Jamaica, we’ll visit Florida, we’ll hire a big car and take everyone with us, Valentina, Libin, everyone. We’ll visit Disneyland too, right, Alik? We’ll have a wonderful time. We’ll stay in motels, just like we used to. They don’t understand a thing, these doctors. We’ll cure you with herbs, the herbs will get you on your feet, they’ve raised worse than you!”

“Try to sleep a little now, Nina,” Fima urged.

She nodded: “Bring me a drink.”

Fima went to fix her drink. The guests had departed.

In a corner of the studio Gioia nursed her little grey Dostoyevsky, waiting to be called. One of the remaining guests slept on, his head covered in a blanket. Lyuda finished washing the glasses and looked at Fima. “It’s the final agony,” he told her.

He brought Nina her drink. She drank it, curled up at Alik’s feet again, muttered something inaudible, and fell asleep. It seemed she still didn’t understand what was happening.

Tomorrow, or rather today, was a working day for Fima. The day after he could take off, the day after that he probably wouldn’t be needed any more. He sat on the bed and spread wide his bumpy knees with their shaggy carpet of hair, a clumsy, tedious man, a failure. There was nothing he could do now but sit here sadly sipping vodka and orange, wetting Alik’s lips—Alik was unable to swallow now—and wait for the inevitable.

Close to morning Alik’s fingers started shaking slightly, and Fima decided the time had come to wake Nina. He stroked her head and she returned slowly from somewhere far away: as always it took her a long time to understand where she had been brought back to. “Nina, wake up!” he said as her eyes finally came to life.

She leaned over her husband and was astonished yet again by the changes that had taken place in him during the short time she had been asleep. His face was now that of a fourteen-year-old boy, childish, bright and calm. But his breathing was almost inaudible.

“Alik.” She stroked his head, his neck. “Oh, Alik.”

There had always been something supernatural about his responsiveness. He would answer her call instantly and from any distance. He would telephone her from another town at the very moment when she was longing for him and needed him most. Now, for the first time, her voice failed to reach him.

“What’s wrong, Fima? What’s happening?”

Fima clasped her thin shoulders. “He’s dying, Nina.”

And she knew it was true.

Her transparent eyes lit up. Pulling herself together, she said to Fima with unexpected firmness: “Go out and don’t come back in here for a while.”

Fima went out without saying a word.