The Funeral Party (12 page)

Putting on a black kimono, she would shut herself in the bedroom again with some delightfully foolish activity: laying out patience maybe, or piecing together a huge jigsaw puzzle. It was usually then that Claude arrived. She would receive her guest in the kitchen and they would drink tiny cups of coffee, one after another. At this time of the day she was unable to eat or drink alcohol; she was terribly weak, and didn’t even have the strength to start smoking until evening, when she had eaten something and poured her first vodka.

Alik would finish work at around seven. If they had money, they would eat in one of the little restaurants in Greenwich Village. Alik’s first years in America were his most successful; there weren’t so many Russian artists living in New York then, and he even enjoyed a small following.

From the start of her life in America Nina was crazy about everything oriental, and they would visit various Chinese or Japanese restaurants. Alik, of course, knew the most authentic ones. Before going out for the evening she would spend a long time dressing up and putting on her make-up. She would generally take her cat Katya with her on these outings. Pale-grey, with yellow eyes, Katya had been brought over from Moscow with all the proper papers, and was also mad: what normal cat would lie for hours across someone’s shoulder, her paws languidly dangling down?

If guests came over they would order pizzas from the café downstairs, or Chinese food from their favourite restaurant in Chinatown, where the owner knew them and always sent over a small present for Nina. People would bring beer or vodka; there wasn’t much hard drinking then. “It’s the climate,” Alik used to say. “There’s no hard drinking in this country, only alcoholism.”

It was true: by Nina’s third year in America she was an
alcoholic, even though she didn’t drink much, and her beauty became even more startling.

The landlord had arrived in the city the previous day to put his affairs in order. He docked Claude’s pay for a garbage fine, and demanded Alik’s immediate eviction on the grounds of his three months’ arrears. Claude tried to defend his oldest resident, citing his terrible illness and apparently imminent death.

“I’ll see for myself,” the landlord declared, and Claude had no option but to take him up to the fifth floor.

It was eleven o’clock and things were in full swing as they got out of the lift. Nobody paid any attention to the bulky old man with the pink, chamois-leather face. There was none of the rowdy merriment and specifically Russian drunkenness he had expected; instead, a large crowd of people were huddled in front of the television. He looked around. He hadn’t been up here for a while. It was a good apartment; fix it up and it would fetch at least thirty-five hundred, maybe forty.

“He’s a fine artist, this guy,” Claude glanced at the canvases stacked against the wall; Alik never liked hanging up his paintings, his old work got in his way.

The landlord peered briefly at them; a friend of his in Chelsea had run a cheap boarding-house here in the twenties. It was more of a flop-house really, and he had let all sorts of riff-raff in, impoverished artists, out-of-work actors. Somehow the place had survived the depression. A few times, out of the goodness of his heart, the man had let his artists give him paintings instead of rent, and he had hung them up in the hall. Years passed, and he turned out to own a collection worth a dozen boarding-houses. But that was a long time ago; times
had changed, artists were two a penny now. “No, no, I don’t want any of these paintings,” he decided.

Nina saw Claude at the entrance and wandered over to him with her elegant, unsteady gait, preparing some French phrase for him. But she didn’t have the chance to use it, because Claude said, “Our landlord’s here on business.”

Nina displayed an unexpected command of the situation. Muttering something to him she darted to Libin, grasped his head in her hands and whispered urgently in his ear: “Our landlord’s here, the super brought him. You must make sure they don’t get near Alik. Please, I’m begging you.”

Libin quickly took in what was happening and went over to the landlord grinning imbecilically. “We’re all a little bit concerned, there’s a political coup going on in Moscow, you see.” He spoke as though he were prime minister of some neighbouring state. As he did so he pushed them towards the lift with his belly. They didn’t resist. By the lift he finally stopped smiling and said very distinctly: “I’m Alik’s brother. I apologise for the arrears, I paid all the rent yesterday and I guarantee it won’t happen again.”

Now the damned Irishman will start ranting, Claude thought. But without saying a word the landlord pressed the button of the lift.

For two days and nights they didn’t switch off the television. For two days and nights the telephone didn’t stop ringing. The door banged incessantly. Alik lay flat and rubbery, like an empty hot-water bottle, but his mind was alert and he assured everyone he was feeling better.

Like a classical drama, the plot had unfolded for three days. In that time the past, from which they had more or less totally cut themselves off, came back into their lives and they were horrified. They wept, searched for familiar faces in the crowds outside the White House, and were rewarded by the moment when Lyuda’s son suddenly yelled: “Look, there’s Dad!”

On the screen a bearded man in glasses, who looked somehow familiar to everyone, was walking towards the camera with his head bowed.

Lyuda clutched her throat with both hands: “It’s Kostya! I knew he’d be there!”

By this time it was obvious that the coup hadn’t succeeded.

“We’ve won,” Alik said.

It was unclear who “we” was, but it was the same “we” Father Victor had discovered to his surprise in Paris at the start of the Second World War. His grandfather, a White officer who had become a priest after emigrating, began to feel this sharp connection with Russia then. All of a sudden, the “they,” for whom his feelings had been hardening during his years in exile, had become that same “we,” very nearly causing him to return home in 1947 to certain death.

Libin disagreed with Alik but he wasn’t going to argue, and merely murmured, “Well it’s not clear who’s won, in fact.”

Everyone was just happy that civil war had been averted, and that the tanks had left the city.

The news bulletins continued uninterruptedly: on Lyubyanka Square they toppled the statue to Dzerzhinsky and showed the empty plinth. The finest monument to Soviet power was an empty pedestal; the party, which had immortalized itself in granite, marble and steel, had crumbled to dust and vanished like an hallucination.

Three people were killed and buried, three grains of sand picked from the crowd by a heavenly hand, three young men with good faces, a Russian, a Ukrainian, a Jew. Over two of them they waved incense, the third was covered with a prayer shawl. There were thousands and thousands of people. There had never been such funerals in this country. It was as though everything sick, rotten and wicked was being thrown away like slops, a bucket of stinking rubbish floating down the river.

The people sitting here now, former Russians, were unanimously happy, and they celebrated not by drinking more than usual but by singing old Soviet songs. Best of all sang Valentina:

There was nothing blue and green in this neighbourhood, this apartment, their lives here had other nuances, other degrees of intensity, yet each recalled the colours of their childhood: Valentina remembered Institute Street in Kaluga, running between two rows of pale lime trees to the soapy-blue Oka; Alik remembered the blues and greens of Moscow Province, the diffident, sweetly trusting colours of the spring foliage and the long tender shadows across the sky; Faika remembered her village, its lank back gardens, and the clumsy golden church domes against the bright-green hedge.

Outside the window the Paraguayan music dragged on, not the salsa now but something wild and mindless, banging and howling. Alik was more sensitive to music than the others. “For Christ’s sake go and shut them up,” he begged Libin.

Libin grabbed Natasha and left.

On the television more crowds appeared. In the room there were also crowds of people, and it seemed to Alik that the two were connected. At times among the familiar faces an unfamiliar one would flash past. He glimpsed a small grey old man in strange white clothes, with a leather strap around his forehead, not quite in focus.

“Nina, who’s that old fellow?” he asked.

Nina started, wondering if he had noticed the landlord.

“See, that little one with the white beard.”

Nina looked, but the old man had disappeared.

The unbearable music disappeared too, and in its place came children, a large number of strange, unfriendly children with animal faces. Despite the lateness of the evening, it was very hot.

Valentina came to Alik. “What would you like?”

“Sing me something cool.”

She sat next to him, embraced his inert leg and sang quietly and very clearly:

Her voice was cool, and ripples from it spread through the air like a toy boat being lowered into the water. Alik saw himself bundled in his old thick brown fur coat tied by the belt with his favourite buckle. His head was covered by a tight beaver-lamb cap on top of a white kerchief, and he was sitting in his old sledge with the bent back. Walking in front of him he saw his mother’s felt boots, and the hem of her blue coat flapping against the grey of the felt. A woollen scarf was tied tightly over his mouth. The scarf was wet and warm, and he had to breathe hard, very hard, because the moment he stopped an icy crust would seal the moist, warm gap and the scarf would freeze and hurt him.

There were more children now, and they were wearing fur coats too, fluffy and covered in snow.

The door banged, and Libin tumbled out of the lift with the six Paraguayans. They were short, dressed in black trousers and white shirts, and banging castanets, rattles and drums.

“Nina, who are these people?” Alik asked uncertainly.

“Libin’s brought them.”

Libin was very drunk. He came up to Alik. “Hey, look at these wonderful guys! I took them for a drink. I thought they wouldn’t be able to play if they had a glass in their hands, and I was right! They’re wonderful guys, but they don’t know any English. One of them can say a few words, the others don’t even speak much Spanish, their language is Guarani or something. We had a drink and I told them my friend was ill, and they said they had some special music for people who are ill. How about it? They’re wonderful guys.”

The Paraguayans had already formed themselves into a line. Their leader, who had a scar across his brick-red face, struck his drum and they moved around in a circle, swaying rhythmically and emitting a strange half-gulp, half-yell, bending their short legs at every step.

The women, who in recent weeks had been so exasperated by their noise, now collapsed into silent laughter. Yet here in the apartment it sounded quite different, eerily serious, reminiscent not of street music but of other, immeasurably greater things. In it was the beat of the heart, the breath of the lungs, the movement of water, the growl of the digestion. Heavens, even their instruments were skulls and bones, and skeletons hung from them like festive decorations. The music finally died away, but before people had time to murmur together in the pause, the men turned to face the other way, still in single file and made another circle, and another kind of music started up, ancient and macabre.

The dance of death, Alik thought.

Suddenly its meaning was revealed to him as the story of the dying body, and the musicians’ movements as part of the
prologue to some theme which would follow. The monotonous and doleful sounds which had so irritated him for weeks past now appeared as familiar as the alphabet, but they broke off, leaving something unsaid.

More and more guests arrived. He saw in the crowd his old school physics teacher, Nikolai Vasilevich, known as the Galosh, and he felt a weary surprise that the man had emigrated at his age. How old would he be now? He saw his classmate Kolka Zaitsev, who had been killed falling under a tram, a thin boy in a ski-jacket with pockets, kicking a soft rag ball in front of him; how sweet that he had brought it along. He saw his cousin Musya, who had died of leukaemia as a child, walking across the room with a washing-up bowl in her hands, only she wasn’t a child now but almost grown up. None of this seemed at all strange to him, but in the correct order of things; there was even a sense of old injustices being put right.

Fima came and touched his cold hand. “Maybe you should come back now, Alik?”

“Okay,” Alik agreed.

Fima gathered up his light body and carried him to the bedroom. His lips were blue, and his fingernails were a paler blue, but his hair burned with its unchanging dark copper colour.

“Hypoxia,” Fima noted automatically.

Nina took one of the bottles from the window-sill. The chief Paraguayan, who was their interpreter, went over to Valentina and asked her if he could touch her hair. With one hand he felt his own rough locks, gleaming like coal, and with the other he ran his fingers through her tinted, many-coloured tresses, and he laughed with delight; two weeks ago they had left their village in the rainforest and had come to New York,
and he hadn’t yet managed to touch all the wonders of this new world. Valentina had the strange sensation that someone was putting a skullcap on her head, but there was nothing unpleasant about it and it soon passed.