The Funeral Party

FOUR

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.

“Listen, Ira, was your husband a religious Jew?” Nina’s wild voice demanded through the mouthpiece.

She must be drunk, Irina thought.

“He certainly was,” she replied.

“Could you get hold of him for me please? Alik needs a rabbi.”

No, she’s just mad, Irina decided.

“We’ll talk about it tomorrow,” she said carefully. “It’s three in the morning, I’m not phoning anyone at this hour!”

“Please Irina, it’s important,” Nina said in a completely clear voice.

“I’ll come round tomorrow, okay?” Irina said, hanging up.

Irina had felt a deep curiosity about Nina. This may have been the real reason she agreed to go to Alik’s studio one-and-a-half years ago, to see for herself this miracle in feathers that had got him.

Since the day he was born, women had always adored Alik. At kindergarten he was his teachers’ pet. Later at school, all the girls would invite him to their birthday parties and would fall in love with him, along with their grandmothers and their grandmothers’ dogs. In his teenage years, when people are driven crazy with impatience for adult life to begin, and good little girls and boys rush into ridiculous adventures, Alik was indispensable: he listened to his friends’ confessions and was able to laugh at them and make them laugh at themselves. But his most rare and precious quality was his confidence that life would begin next Monday and that yesterday could be erased, especially if it hadn’t been totally successful. At the School of Performing Arts, where he was a student, even the inspector of his course, known as Snake Venom, proved susceptible to his charms. Four times he was expelled, and three times, thanks to her efforts, he was taken back.

Nina struck Irina at their first meeting as a silly woman, stuck-up and capricious. Before her in the studio she saw a faded beauty seated on a dirty white carpet, doing a giant jigsaw puzzle and asking not to be disturbed. On closer acquaintance she turned out to be merely simple-minded, and psychologically unbalanced too; inertia alternated with hysteria, bouts of joy with melancholy.

She understood why Alik had married her, but he had obviously had to put up with years of her mind-numbing silliness, pathological laziness and muddle. Irina felt not so much retrospective jealousy as a deep sense of puzzlement. She had never come across Nina’s type before. Her infinite helplessness clearly aroused in others, particularly men, feelings of heightened responsibility. She had another trait too: each of her whims, caprices and weaknesses she took to the limit. For instance, she refused to touch money, so that if Alik went to Washington for a week he would have to fill the fridge with food before he left, knowing that she wouldn’t go to the store and would rather starve than handle filthy banknotes. As well as this Nina never cooked, because she was afraid of fire. In Russia she had been keen on astrology, and had read that as a Libra she was in danger from fire. From then on she never went near the stove, fearful of the cosmic incompatibility of the air and fire elements. Here in Alik’s studio, where the stove was not gas but electric, and the only living flame she ever came into contact with was at the end of a match, her aversion to cooking remained as strong as ever, and Alik learned to be a successful and imaginative cook.

Apart from money and fire there was something else, something more intangible, an insane, senseless fear of making decisions. The more insignificant the decision, the more Nina anguished over it. Irina once received some free opera tickets from a client who was a singer, and at Maika’s request they invited Alik and Nina along. They arrived to pick them up and witnessed Nina’s indecision as she tried on endless little black dresses and smart shoes, finally flinging herself on the bed, sobbing into the pillow and refusing to go, until Alik, avoiding the eyes of the involuntary onlookers, picked a dress at random and said: “Wear this one Nina, velvet and the opera go together like beer and sausages.”

Maika evidently enjoyed this spectacle far more than she enjoyed the rather mediocre opera.

Irina knew perfectly well the value of such antics; her youth had been full of them. But unlike Nina she had the circus school behind her. Tightrope-walking is a very valuable skill for an emigré, and perhaps this explained why she was the most successful of them. The soles of the feet hurt, the heart almost stops, the sweat pours into the eyes, but the muscles stretch to a wide, all-purpose smile, the chin tilts victoriously, the tip of the nose points to the stars—light and easy, easy and light.

For eight years she had skipped precisely two hours of sleep every night, fighting tooth and nail for her expensive American profession. And now she had to make ten decisions a day and had long since learned not to get too upset if today’s proved not to be the best. “The past is definitive and irreversible, but it has no power over the future,” she would say at such times. And suddenly it turned out that her irreversible past did have power over her.

Irina had had no discussions with Alik about his impending death or his past life, but what she hadn’t dared to dream about had taken place; her little girl talked with him and his friends so easily and freely that none of them had any idea of the complex psychological disorder she had suffered. And now Irina couldn’t explain to herself how she too had spent almost every free minute of her time for the last two years in his noisy, disorderly lair.

An English goldfish named Doctor Harris (he looked more like a sunburnt tunny than a delicate veiltail), whom Irina had been discreetly dating for four years, had just visited New York for five days, almost failed to reach her and flown out disappointed, convinced that she was planning to drop him. But dropping him didn’t come into Irina’s plans. Harris was a renowned authority on copyright law. His status was such that in the normal course of events she would never have met him, and it was by sheer chance that one of the partners at her law firm decided to take her with him to England for a business meeting. Afterwards there was a party at which virtually no women were present, and she shone against the black dinner-jackets like a dove in a flock of crows. Two months later, after she had forgotten about the trip, she received an invitation to attend a conference of young lawyers. Her boss was at a loss to explain it, but could hardly suspect Harris of taking an interest in his diminutive assistant. He had let her go to Europe for three days. And now it turned out that Harris wanted to get married. It wasn’t just self-interest either, it was serious.

Every woman who has turned forty dreams of a Harris, and Irina had just turned forty.

It was all rather foolish really.

The following evening Irina arrived to see Nina. Old Maria Ignatevna was in the bedroom, having called in for five minutes before her flight. Nina was scurrying around after her. The studio was filled with people as usual.

Irina was hungry. She opened the fridge. There wasn’t much in there, just some expensive black bread wrapped in paper from the Russian grocer and a lump of stale cheese. She made a sandwich and drank some of Nina’s vodka and orange; everyone was drinking screwdrivers in this house for some reason. Finally Nina slipped out of the bedroom.

“So what do you want Gottlieb for?” Irina asked.

“Who’s Gottlieb?” Nina looked baffled.

“Oh Lord, Nina, have you forgotten? You called me last night!”

“Oh that, I didn’t know his name. Alik said we must get him a rabbi,” Nina said innocently.

Irina felt a surge of irritation and wondered why she bothered with this imbecile, but she contained herself and asked in a professional tone: “Why a rabbi? Are you sure you haven’t made a mistake?”

Nina beamed. “You don’t know anything! He’s agreed to get baptized!”

Irina burst out: “But Nina, you need a priest to do that!”

“That’s right, a priest,” Nina nodded. “I know. I’ve already arranged it. But Alik asked … he wants to talk to a rabbi too.”

“He wants to be baptized?” Irina said in amazement, finally understanding.

Nina dropped her narrow face into her bony, no longer beautiful hands. “Fima says it looks bad. Everyone says it looks bad. Maria Ignatevna says it’s his only hope now. I don’t want him to go off into nowhere, I want God to accept him. You can’t imagine what the darkness is like, it’s impossible to describe … ”

Nina knew something about the darkness, having made three suicide attempts herself, one in her early youth, the second when Alik left Russia, and the third in America after her baby was stillborn.

“We must do it quick.” She poured the remains of the orange juice into her glass. “Bring me more juice will you, Irina? We’re all right for vodka, Slavik bought some yesterday. Just get your Gottlieb over here with the rabbi.”

Irina picked up her handbag and put her hand into the metal cruet on top of the fridge where the bills were kept, but it was empty: someone had already paid them.