The Funeral Party (13 page)

Alik was fighting for air. He knew that he must breathe as deeply as possible, otherwise the warm gap in his scarf would close. He breathed in convulsively, rather more often than he breathed out.

“I’m tired,” he said.

Fima held his wrist, dry as the branch of a dead tree. The diaphragm muscle was dying now, the lungs were dying, the heart. Fima opened his medical bag and pondered. He could give Alik a camphor injection, drive on his exhausted heart and make it gallop for a while. Or morphine maybe, a blissful oblivion from which he wouldn’t return. Or things could just take their course. In that case he wouldn’t live more than a day, two at most. There was no knowing how many hours he might last.

This country hated suffering; it rejected it ontologically, admitting it only as an incident which must be instantly eradicated. This young, suffering denying nation had developed whole schools—philosophical, psychological and medical—dedicated to the single problem of how to save people from suffering. Fima’s Russian brain had difficulty in coping with this concept. The land which had raised him loved and valued suffering, and derived its nourishment from it: from suffering people grew, developed, became wise. Fima’s Jewish blood, filtered for millennia through suffering, carried within it an extra vital substance which disintegrated in its absence; people like
him lost touch with the earth under their feet when released from suffering.

But none of this applied now to Alik; Fima didn’t want his friend to suffer so cruelly during the last hours of his life.

“We’d better call the ambulance, Nina,” he said, more resolutely than he felt.

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.

Lyuda stood irresolutely at the door, looking in.

“Go away all of you, all of you!” Nina’s gesture was majestic, even theatrical.

Gioia sat in the corner resting her chin on her knee, and said in surprise: “But Nina, I was going to sit with him.”

“Everybody out, I said!”

Gioia flushed, shook herself and ran to the lift. Lyuda stood distractedly in the middle of the studio. The sleeping guest snored on with the blanket over his head.

Nina ran to the kitchen and groped in the back of the cupboard for a white porcelain soup tureen.

For a moment she recalled the marvellous day in Washington when they had bought it. They had been staying with their friend Slavka Crane, a cheerful double-bass player who had retrained as a sad computer programmer. They had eaten breakfast in a small restaurant near a little square in the Alexandria district. Some pensioners were playing astoundingly bad
but free music on the street, and afterwards Slavka had taken them off to an open-air market. It was such a happy day that they decided to buy something beautiful, but for a few cents (as always, they were very short of money), and a handsome grey-haired black man with a withered arm had sold them this English soup tureen dating from the time of the Boston tea party. They had spent the rest of the day dragging around with them this large, inconvenient object which they couldn’t fit in their bag, and Slavka had gone in his car to meet someone or see them off.

“This is why we bought it,” Nina thought now, filling it with water.

Drawing herself up to her full height, she solemnly carried it into the bedroom, holding it to her face and pressing her lips against its sides.

She’s really crazy now, Fima frowned, what will she do next? She had already forgotten that she had just sent everyone out.

She placed the bowl carefully on the stool, took three candles out of the cupboard, lit them and melted their bases, then stuck them to the porcelain rim of the bowl. She did all this quickly and effortlessly; it was as though everything she needed was coming out to meet her.

She took the paper icon from the wall and smiled, remembering the strange man who had left it there. He was one of the many homeless emigrés who had stayed with them. Although Nina had been generally indifferent to their guests and barely noticed them, this one she had asked Alik to send away. But Alik had merely said, “Shut up, Nina, we live too well.” He was an odd, mad young man. He didn’t wash and wore what appeared to be chains on his body. He hated America, and the only reason he had come was that he had had a vision
that Christ was living there, and he had come to find Him. He chased around Central Park all day looking for Him, then someone helped him to see the light, and he went to California, to a fellow seeker, an American this time—Serafim or Sebastian or something—also mad, apparently, and a monk.

Nina propped the icon against the bowl, gazed at Alik and thought for a moment. Something troubled her—his name. His name was a problem: although people always called him Alik, he had been registered as Abraham in honour of his dead grandfather. Before his parents divorced, they had quarrelled about whose idea it had been to give their child this stupid, provocative name; even some of his closest friends didn’t know his real name, particularly since he had put it down as Alik on his American papers.

Whatever the name, the man destined to bear it hadn’t much longer to live. He gasped convulsively from time to time. Nina rushed to the bookshelf, looking for a church calendar. At random, she pulled out the right volume from behind a jumble of books. For 22 August she read: “Martyrs Fotii and Anikita, Pamphil and Kapiton. Holy Martyr Alexander.” Everything was right again, the name was right; everything was coming out to meet her again. She smiled.

“Alik!” she cried. “Please don’t be angry or offended, I’m going to baptize you.”

She took from her long neck the gold cross that used to belong to her grandmother, a Ters cossack. Maria Ignatevna had told her what to do. Any Christian could do it if someone was dying; just a cross made with water or sand, a gold cross, or even some matches tied in a cross. Now she just had to say a few simple words she had memorized. She crossed herself, dipped the cross in the water and said in a hoarse voice: “In
the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost …” She made the sign of the cross in the water, dipped her hand in, scooped up a handful of water and sprinkled it over her husband’s face. “… I baptize thee, Alik, servant of God.”

At the critical moment she didn’t notice that the truly suitable name of Alexander had flown out of her head.

She was unsure what to do next. With the cross in one hand she sat beside him rubbing the baptismal water over his face and chest. One of the candles bent over the rim of the bowl and, in defiance of the laws of physics, fell inside the now holy vessel. It spluttered and went out. Nina laid the cross on his neck. “Alik, Alik!” she called.