The Funeral Party (5 page)

Irina found him without difficulty in the telephone directory. When she asked him to meet her urgently he was greatly taken aback, and in the two hours it took her to reach him in the Bronx he anxiously awaited some major unpleasantness, or at least inconvenience, from her.

His office was rather shabby. The business he did there had been hatched by Irina, whose practical mind and easygoing attitude to money had served him well during their brief marriage. It was she who at the start of it had persuaded him to invest all his money, his laboriously accumulated five thousand dollars, in a high-risk kosher cosmetics business. This had proved to be brilliantly profitable. Irina was still in the throes of her short-lived love affair with Judaism then, a gentle, reformed Judaism to be sure, but one which respected the dramatic connection between milk and meat, especially meat which had oinked when alive.

Leva’s cosmetics were just starting to find their market when Irina, plastered in non-kosher all-American cosmetics,
walked out on him. As he embarked on this new phase of his life he quickly changed orientation and betrayed reformism for orthodoxy. There was a political reason he had to stop producing the crude paints which had defiled the noble faces of Jewish women, and sold this part of his business to his cousin, reserving for himself the production of kosher soaps and shampoos. He also learned to make kosher aspirin and other drugs, and he had plenty of customers, who evidently didn’t regard the idea as a complete swindle.

Leva met Irina at the door to his office. Both were greatly changed, but these changes weren’t so much to do with the passing of time as with the new directions their lives had taken. Leva had filled out, his jowls were fleshier and his back broader, which made him appear shorter; his face had lost the pink and white hue of the young King David, and he had acquired a sallow complexion. Irina, who during their marriage used to go around in knitted jerseys with holes on the shoulder and long Indian skirts which swept the floor, dazzled him now with her impeccable, fashion-plate looks, the sculpted elegance of her brows and nose, her firm chin and soft lips.

“A pearl, a real pearl,” he thought, and said it out loud.

Irina laughed, her old light laugh. “I’m glad you like me, Leva, you don’t look bad either, you’re a serious, important-looking man now!”

“I’ve five children, Irina, five.” He pulled a small photograph album from his desk. “So how’s Maika?”

“She’s fine, she’s a big girl already.” Irina examined the album and nodded, then put it back on the desk. “The thing is, an old friend, a Jew, someone I used to know in Moscow, is very ill. He’s dying. He wants to talk to a rabbi. Could you arrange it?”

“Is that all?” Leva felt hugely relieved. He had imagined
she might make some financial claim to those five thousand dollars from the time they were married. He was a good man but he was burdened by family worries, and he hated unexpected expenses. “I can get you ten if you need it.”

Immediately he had said it he felt embarrassed, but Irina didn’t notice, or pretended not to. “It’s urgent, he’s terribly ill,” she said.

Leva promised to call her that evening.

He did indeed call that evening, and told her that he would be bringing round a well-known rabbi from Israel who was delivering a course of erudite lectures at New York University; he agreed to bring him to the sick man as soon as the Sabbath was over.

It was uncharacteristic of Irina, who never forgot anything, to forget that the Jewish Sabbath ended on Saturday evening and she told Nina the rabbi would be coming on Sunday morning.

The priest, Father Victor, promised to visit on Saturday after early vespers. Nina attached great importance to the fact that the priest was coming first.

Fima visited Berman very late, without calling him first, this familiarity being usual between them. They were connected by old friendship. There was a distant family connection too, on their grandfather’s side, but this wasn’t important: what was important was that they had both been born doctors, in the sense that it pleases nature for someone to be born blond, or a singer, or a coward.

With these two it was a feeling for the human body, a sense of the circulation of the blood, a particular way of thinking: something systemic, as Berman put it. Both could spot the particular idiosyncrasies linked to a certain type of metabolism, which predisposed someone to high blood pressure, ulcers, cancer, asthma. At the start of a medical examination they would observe whether the skin was dry, the white of the eye dull, the corners of the mouth enflamed.

In recent years they rarely examined anyone, however, unless requested to by friends.

Unlike Fima, Berman had passed all the American medical exams and validated his Russian qualifications two months after he arrived, thereby setting a local record: no one had yet completed the medical course so quickly. He immediately found a job in one of the city’s hospitals. He became acquainted with American medical practice, devoting seventy hours a week to it, and it appeared to him just as unsatisfactory as medicine in Russia, although for different reasons. After this he discovered a field which enabled him to keep his distance from American doctors, for he had little respect for them. It was a new field, recently invented, called radio-medicine, a diagnostic procedure which involved passing radioisotopes through the organism, and was followed up by a computer analysis.

In Russia they wouldn’t have it for twenty years, he thought ruefully, maybe never.

Berman often said that he had used up what was left of his brains on mastering the skill to operate his new computer, his energy on raising the money to pay for it and open his diagnostic laboratory, and expected to spend what was left of his life on repaying the enormous debts he had achieved as a result. His work nevertheless went well, the business grew, increasing its turnover. For the time being, however, all of his income went on covering the interest on his loans, which in this country grew quickly and imperceptibly, like mildew across a damp wall. “We live like the rest of America,” he would grin, clapping Fima on the shoulder.

Berman’s debts were over four hundred thousand dollars. Fima’s were four hundred dollars. In other words, according to American logic, the first prospered and the other lived in penury. In fact they both lived in identically shabby apartments and ate the same cheap food, the only difference being
that while Fima dressed like a tramp, Berman bought himself three respectable “doctor’s” suits.

Both knew that if lenders judged Berman’s brains, education, or speculative business project to be that creditworthy, then it was no more than his due; he could have moved to the fashionable Upper East Side of Manhattan if he hadn’t been so cautious with money.

Fima hunched into himself. It wasn’t exactly envy he felt, but something morbid stirred in his soul. To be fair, when Berman opened his laboratory he had offered him work as his lab assistant. But Fima would have had to take various special courses for this, and he was still poring over his English textbooks trying to convince himself that next year he would finally mobilize himself to take his damned exams. In a word, the amiable offer was refused; to accept would have meant his total and final capitulation.

Years ago in Russia they had been equals, two talented young doctors who knew their worth. Here, thanks to Fima’s inability to get his tongue round this damned language, Berman had shot so far ahead that Fima could never catch up with him. Now with Alik they were equals as before, two doctors attending the same patient.

Their meeting that night in Alik’s kitchen was actually more of a consultation. Alik had turned first to Fima when his right arm started letting him down two years ago.

“It’s nothing, just professional exhaustion—tendonitis probably,” was Fima’s first diagnosis. He had to revise this opinion when Alik’s left arm also started to seize up. If it hadn’t happened so suddenly Fima might have suspected multiple sclerosis. As it was, major tests were needed.

The first set of tests were carried out by Berman, free of
charge, naturally; he even paid for the isotopes. Nothing showed up on the computer.

“It’s American, it won’t work for nothing!” Berman grimaced. “Better buy yourself some health insurance old man, while you still look okay. It’ll be valid in six months, you’ll need it, I guarantee, these things don’t just pass.”

Alik had no money for insurance, and he never thought about what was going to happen in six months’ time. This, plus his dislike of queues, forms and officials left over from Soviet times, was the reason he had never had any American benefits. While some of his fellow-emigrés vied to cadge as many hand-outs as possible, from food stamps to free rent, Alik had managed to live for almost two decades as free as air, working away on his own and out of sight and giving many of those who didn’t know him well the impression that he merely improvised as he went along. The people he annoyed most were not the honest grafters but the inveterate scroungers.

In short, he had never had a regular job or any insurance either, and there was no prospect of him getting either now: this was no time for him to be queuing for days in endless corridors and collecting the necessary paperwork.

Fortunately the computerized, efficient American health service left a few gaps, and his first tests were on someone else’s papers. The blood analysis showed nothing.

His first hospitalization was organized on the sidewalk: a little spectacle was staged, an ambulance was called. The owner of the café across the street from Alik’s building called the hospital, saying that a man had collapsed unconscious by his door. Lying across three chairs, dangling his auburn ponytail and winking at his friend the café-owner, Alik waited five minutes for the ambulance. He was driven off, examined, and
treated on Medicaid by neuropathologists, who attached him to tubes and prescribed drugs. The hospital was depressing, and Alik discharged himself. Fima shouted at him: the prescriptions were fine, they were treating the symptoms, what more could they do without a diagnosis? Fima insisted he go back, and the only way to do this was to cook something up. He quickly arranged a small fistula on Alik’s collar-bone, and Alik announced that his condition had deteriorated after his unsuccessful treatment. The city hospital, although not private, disliked lawsuits and took him back.

It dragged on. Alik returned to hospital and discharged himself again. It wasn’t clear if the treatment helped, or how he would have been without it. His right arm hung lifeless, with the left he could barely lift a spoon to his mouth. His gait changed. He became tired. He stumbled. Then he fell for the first time. It all happened with frightening speed. The following spring he was barely able to move.

Alik’s second hospitalization was more difficult. He was taken to Berman’s laboratory and Berman himself called for the ambulance, saying that he had a seriously ill patient at reception. The ambulance demanded a written undertaking that the patient wouldn’t die on the journey. Berman, who knew all the bureaucratic tricks in this country, had already written it and accompanied Alik to the hospital. By a stroke of luck the nurse in charge turned out to be a friend of his, an old Irishwoman, frowning, abrupt, and a perfect angel. She sent them to the Chinese hospital, which was considered the best of the city’s state institutions. This was a good move. As well as the usual drugs Alik was given acupuncture and moxa, and in the first week he perked up a little and it even seemed as though some of the feeling returned to his arm.

Now Fima sat with Berman in Alik’s dingy kitchen with
the dirty cups and happy cockroaches. They had already run out of hypotheses: amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a viral infection, some mysterious tumour.

Berman was rather good-looking, but there was something of the ape about him with his strong, stooping shoulders, his short inflexible neck and long arms; even his mouth was stretched tightly over his large teeth. Fima was all rough and gnarled; bright clear eyes looked expectantly at Berman out of his pitted face.

“It’s hopeless, Fima. There’s nothing to be done in these cases, just the oxygen mask.”

“Asphyxiation may progress slowly and painfully,” Fima frowned.

“Give him morphine, or whatever.”

“Right,” Fima muttered.

He had hoped clever Berman might know something he had forgotten, but such knowledge didn’t exist.

Father Victor arrived at about nine, without socks and in sandals, carrying an attaché case and a bulging plastic bag. He was wearing a baggy shirt tucked into light, shortish trousers and a baseball cap with the innocuous letters “N” and “Y” on it.