The Funeral Party (8 page)

He had understood for the first time what this land meant for him when he left it. He was young then; he had graduated from university and had been sent to Germany to study philosophy. A year of concentrated study exhausted his interest in European philosophy, torn off from its living roots, which he recognized exclusively in the Torah. This ended the brief period of his academic education, and in the second half of his third decade, he embarked on the traditional path of Judaic science which is more accurately called theology.

He had married a silent girl who shaved off her vibrant auburn tresses the day before the wedding, and since then he
had enjoyed the harmony which comes from a life whose every detail is regulated with clockwork precision, and from the intellectual rigours of being at the same time both teacher and pupil.

His world had completely changed: the information which most people receive from radio, television and the secular press passed him by, and he was nourished by the ancient code of Shulkhan Arukh, the table laid for those who wish to partake of the Jewish spiritual heritage, and by the high-voiced clamour of his many children.

Five years later his first book was published, an exploration of the stylistic differences between Saadia’s commentaries on Daniel and the Chronicles. Two years after this he moved to Tzfat.

His world was biblically simple and talmudically complicated, yet all its facets connected, and his daily work with his medieval texts cast a shadow of the eternal over the present. Below him at the bottom of the mountain shone the blue Sea of Galilee, and he experienced a deep feeling of gratitude to the Almighty—Christians might call it Phariseeism—for the happy fate that had been granted to him of serving and knowing, and for the holiness of this land which appears to many as a dirty, provincial eastern state, but which for him was the undisputed centre of the world, in relation to which all other states with their histories and cultures could be read only as commentaries.

The priest had already removed his surplice and was pushing through the crowd of guests towards him. “I hear you’ve come from Israel to teach a course of Judaics?” he asked in school-book English.

Reb Menashe stood up. He had never talked to a priest
before. “Yes, I’m lecturing on Judaeo-Islamic culture at the Jewish university here.”

“They do some wonderful courses, I once read a book about biblical archaeology published by that university.” The priest broke into a happy smile. “Your Judaeo-Islamic theme is presumably developed in the context of the contemporary world by some sort of trade-off?”

“Trade-off?” Reb Menashe didn’t understand the expression. “No no, political parallels don’t concern me, I’m interested in philosophy.” He seemed agitated.

Alik called to Valentina. “Valentina, keep an eye on those two and make sure they don’t stay sober!”

Valentina came over, pink and plump, holding more paper cups to her chest. She put them before Leva, and the three men drank together. A moment later their heads came together, they nodded their beards and gesticulated. Alik looked at them with deep satisfaction and said to Libin: “I think I’ve successfully played the role of Saladin today.”

Valentina sought Libin’s eyes and nodded towards the kitchen. A moment later she was squeezing him into a corner. “I can’t ask her, you’ll have to,” she said urgently.

“I see, you can’t, so it’s down to me.” Libin was offended.

“That’s enough. We must pay right now, at least for one month!”

“We’ve only just been asking for money.”

“Just—a month ago,” Valentina shrugged. “Why should I fork out more than anyone else? I paid the phone bill last month, it was all out-of-town calls. Nina talks a lot when she’s drinking.”

“She’s only just given money,” Libin sighed.

“Okay, ask someone else then, how about Faika?”

Libin burst out laughing: Faika was up to her ears in debt, and there wasn’t a person in this room to whom she didn’t owe at least ten dollars. Libin had no choice but to go to Irina.

Money wasn’t just a mess, it was a disaster. In the years before Alik became ill he had sold few paintings, and now that he had stopped working and could no longer run around the galleries his income was virtually zero, or rather less than zero. Debts grew: those which had to be settled, such as rent and phone bills, and those which would never be paid, like medical bills.

As well as this there was another unpleasant story, which had dragged on for several years. Two gallery-owners from Washington had organized an exhibition for Alik and had failed to return twelve of his works. Alik himself was partly to blame for this, and it would never have happened if he had gone back to the gallery on the day the exhibition closed, as they had agreed, and taken everything back. But he was enjoying in advance the sale of three of his paintings, and had borrowed the money to go off to Jamaica with Nina, so he didn’t make the final day. Even when he came back he didn’t go immediately. The cheque for the paintings didn’t arrive for some reason, so he phoned Washington to find out why. They asked him where he had been, and told him the works had been returned and had had to be put in storage, since the gallery had no space for them. This was a barefaced lie.

Alik had asked Irina to help. Another fact emerged: when he signed the contract he had left his copy with the gallery-owners. This blunder gave them the upper hand and made them even more brazen, and there seemed to be almost nothing Irina could do about it. All she had was the catalogue
of the exhibition, which contained information about the paintings and a reproduction of one of those that had ostensibly been sold. She embarked on the process of suing the gallery, and while the case creaked on she reluctantly made Alik out a cheque for five thousand dollars. She told him she had screwed it out of them; in reality she still was fairly hopeful of recovering some of the money.

It was the beginning of winter. When she gave Alik the cheque he was overjoyed: “I’m lost for words, I can’t thank you enough, now we can pay the rent and finally buy Nina that fur coat.”

Irina was furious; she hadn’t given him money she had earned by the sweat of her brow to buy fur coats. But there was nothing to be done, half of the money was blown on a coat. Nina and Alik were like that; they never did anything by halves.

“Bloody bohemians,” Irina fumed. “Perhaps they haven’t eaten enough shit since they’ve been here.”

Exhaling the hot breath from her lungs, she decided that she would help them in future with small sums, in response to their immediate needs. She was a single woman with a child after all, and not nearly as rich as they seemed to think she was; it was hard enough for her to earn the damned stuff in the first place.

When Libin came up to her she already had her chequebook out. Over time the small sums grew unnoticed, like children.

The bearded men walked out to the street. Gottlieb didn’t feel drunk at all, but he had forgotten where he had left his car, and the place where he expected to find it was occupied by someone else’s long-backed Pontiac.

“They’ve towed it away, they’ve towed it away!” Father Victor laughed like a child, without malice.

“You can park here, why would they tow it away?” Gottlieb said peevishly. “You wait, I’ll look round the corner.”

The rabbi displayed no interest in which car they would be driving him back in, he was more intrigued by what the funny man in the cap was saying: “With your permission, I’d like to go on,” Father Victor was in a hurry to share his thoughts with his unusual companion. “The first experiment was successful, you might say. The diaspora proved exceptionally valuable for the entire world. Of course you’ve brought back together what’s left of you over there, but so many Jews have assimilated, diluted, there are so many of you in all countries,
in science, culture, the arts. In some ways I’m a Judophile. Every decent Christian must respect the chosen people. You understand how important it is that Jews have poured their precious blood into every culture, every nation. And from this what do we get? It’s a worldwide process! The Russians leave their ghetto, and the Chinese. Mark my words, from these young American Chinese we’re getting the best musicians, the best mathematicians. I’ll go further—mixed marriages! You see what I’m saying? It’s the creating of a new people!”

The rabbi appeared to understand quite well what his opponent was saying, but he didn’t by any means share his thoughts on the subject and merely chewed his lip. Three glasses or four. He couldn’t remember, at any event it had evidently been a lot.

“We’re living in new times! Neither Jew nor gentile, and in the most direct sense too!” the priest said happily.

The rabbi stopped walking and wagged a finger at him. “That’s it, that’s the most important thing for you isn’t it—no Jews.”

Gottlieb finally drove up in his car, opened the door for his rabbi, then rudely drove off leaving Father Victor alone on the street in a state of deep mortification. “Look how he twists things, I meant nothing of the sort.”

People didn’t so much disperse as melt away. A few stayed behind to sleep on the carpet. One of those on the carpet that night was Nina; this night was Valentina’s.

Alik fell asleep as soon as the guests left, and Valentina curled up at his feet. She could have slept there, but as though to spite her, sleep didn’t come; she had noticed that alcohol had lately had the strange effect of driving it out.

She had arrived in New York in November 1981. She was twenty-eight, 165 centimetres tall, and weighed 85 kilograms. She didn’t reckon in pounds then. She was wearing a black hand-woven wool-embroidered shirt from the Gutsul region of the Ukraine. In her cheap cloth suitcase she carried her completed dissertation, of no possible use to her now, a complete holiday costume as worn by a Vologda peasant woman
from the late nineteenth century, and three Antonov apples which she was forbidden to import, and whose powerful smell emanated from her feeble case. The apples were intended for her American husband, who for some reason wasn’t there to meet her.

A week earlier she had bought her ticket for New York and had called to tell him she was coming. He seemed happy and promised to meet her. Their marriage was a fictitious one, but they were true friends. Mickey had lived for a year in Russia, collecting material on the Soviet cinema of the thirties and enduring a neurasthenic love affair with a little monster who humiliated and robbed him and put him through a hell of jealousy. He had met Valentina at Moscow’s fashionable philology school. She had taken him back to her place, given him valerian drops to drink, fed him Russian dumplings and finally heard the shattering confession of a homosexual crushed by the incontrovertibility of his own nature. Mickey was tall and delicate-looking. He wept and poured out his anguish to her, keeping up a running psychoanalytical commentary all the while. Her heart melted, and she marvelled at the capriciousness of nature. During a brief respite in his two-hour monologue she asked him: “So you’ve never been with a woman then?”

It proved not quite so simple: when he was fourteen, his seventeen-year-old cousin from Connecticut had stayed in their house for a month and a half and had tormented him with her caresses, finally abandoning him in a state of exhausting virginity and indelible sinfulness.

This emotional tale, crammed with relevant details, seemed a little too literary to Valentina, and by the time it was over she was exhausted. Laying his hands firmly on her fine nipples, she raped him without any great difficulty and to his
complete satisfaction. It remained the only such occasion in his life, but from then on their relationship assumed an unusual warmth and intimacy.

Valentina was experiencing her own emotional crisis at the time, having just been stunningly betrayed by the man she loved. He was a well-known dissident who had survived a stint in prison, and was widely regarded as a hero of irreproachable honesty and courage. But there was evidently a joint running between his upper and lower halves: the upper half was exemplary, the lower was vicious. With women he was insatiable and promiscuous, and he used all of them. His departure from Russia was mourned by many beautiful girlfriends of the most extreme anti-Soviet persuasion, and the lives of at least two illegitimate children would have to be sustained only by heroic legends about their father.