The Funeral Party (11 page)

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.

The landlord of the building was a louse. Alik was his first tenant and had been a thorn in his side for almost twenty years. He had moved in just as the place fell into the man’s hands and the lofts became vacant. The run-down former factory district of Chelsea, vividly described in the writings of Alik’s beloved O. Henry, had become increasingly fashionable. Next to it stood Greenwich Village, with its bohemian social life, its narcotic delights, its cheerful clubs and night-life, which spread out to the adjacent districts. In the past twenty years the price of accommodation had shot up at least tenfold, but Alik’s rent was fixed and he still paid only four hundred a month, and was constantly late with it too.

The landlord lived in one of New York’s wealthy suburbs and left everything to his superintendent, a paid job which combined the duties of both janitor and house-manager. The “super” here was called Claude, and he had worked in the building virtually since its occupation. Claude was a highly
original man, half-French with a complicated history. From the stories he told Alik, Trinidad would surface, with an ocean yacht, and North Africa, with dangerous hunting-trips. Most of it he probably invented, yet one had the impression that his real life was no less interesting, and Alik would fill in the gaps, telling everyone he was a great card-sharp, that he had been arrested and imprisoned in a Turkish jail and had escaped in a hot-air balloon.

Twice, when things were particularly difficult, Claude, who wasn’t without artistic and philanthropic interests, had bailed Alik out by buying his paintings. There aren’t many superintendents who buy art. As well as this, Claude loved Nina. He would drop by to chat with her and she would make him coffee and occasionally lay out cards for a silly fortune-telling game, “find the queen.” Not knowing a word of English when she arrived in this country, she had immediately started learning French. This peculiar idiocy was typical of her, and it was probably the reason Claude loved her so much. He too had his peculiarities, and unlike everyone else he preferred Nina to Alik.

Visiting usually in the first part of the day, Claude saw an element of strict order in her chaotic and disorderly life. She would get up at about one and utter a weak cry. Alik would make her coffee and take it into the bedroom with a glass of cold water. This was when he was working, so he rarely spoke to her then. She would come round slowly, take a long bath, anoint her face and body with various creams sent by a friend from Moscow—she didn’t recognize the American ones—and pass a brush endlessly over her renowned hair; in her youth she had worked for several years as a model at one of Moscow’s fashion houses, and she could never forget this marvellous time in her life.