The Funeral Party (2 page)

The lift clattered again, and in the doorway of the studio Nina saw a new visitor. Pulling on her black kimono, she flew out to meet her.

A short, immensely fat old woman seated herself breathlessly in a low armchair and planted a bulging cloth shopping-bag between her feet. She was crimson and steaming, her cheeks gleamed like a samovar.

“Maria Ignatevna, over two days I’ve been waiting for you!”

The old woman sat on the edge of the chair spreading wide her pink feet in little slipper-socks of a kind not found on this continent. “I didn’t forget you, dear, I’ve been working with Alik all this time. He was in my thoughts yesterday from six in the evening.” She held up before Nina’s face her crooked, distrophied hands with their greenish fingernails. “It’s hypertension, dear, my blood pressure’s up, I can barely walk. This wretched heat. Never mind, here’s the last of them.”

She fished out of her bag three large dark bottles containing a thick liquid. “I’ve mixed him these new oils for rubbing and inhaling. This one’s for his feet. Put some on a cloth and wrap it round his feet, then tie a plastic bag on top and leave it for a couple of hours. Never mind if bits of skin peel off, just give him a good wash the minute you take it off.”

Nina gazed raptly at this human scarecrow and her collection of remedies. Taking the smallest bottle she pressed it to her cheek to cool it, then carried them all into the bedroom, drew the blinds and set them on the narrow window-sill, where a battery of them already stood waiting.

Maria Ignatevna busied herself in the kitchen making tea; she was the only one of them who could drink it in this heat, not iced American tea, but hot Russian tea with jam and sugar.

Nina shook her long hair, whose gilt was wearing away to reveal a deeper silver underneath, and started putting compresses on Alik’s feet. Then she covered his body with a thin bedspread of some fake, clanless Scottish tartan.

Maria Ignatevna was chatting with Fima, who wanted to know about her results.

She peered at him with benign contempt. “Results? Efim Isakich! Fima! What results! They smell of the earth. It’s all in God’s hands, that’s what I say. I’ve seen it for myself—someone’s going, they’re just about to go, but no, He won’t let them. There’s power in those plants, they can go through rock. It’s the top bit you need. I only use the top bit, even with the roots. A person’s bent right down to the ground, next minute they’re standing up right as rain! You must have faith in God, Fima. Without God even the plants won’t grow!”

“I expect you’re right,” Fima said lightly, rubbing his left
cheek, still pitted with the traces of hormonal battles of his youth.

In his fifth year of botany he had studied positive phototaxis, about which this woman with a face like a dishcloth uttered her vague and enigmatic pronouncements. But whatever skills he possessed as a doctor told him there was no hope for Alik and his cursed illness; his last working muscle, in his diaphragm, was already packing up. In the next few days death from asphyxiation would surely follow. The question for Americans in these cases—when to switch off the machine—had been settled ahead of time by Alik himself: he had left the hospital just before the end, and in so doing had refused the pathetic makeweight of an artificially prolonged life.

It depressed Fima to think that at some point he would probably be the one to administer to Alik the sedative which would ease the torment of asphyxiation, depressing his respiratory system as a side effect, and thereby killing him. But there was nothing to be done about it; calling for an ambulance to take him to the hospital, as they had done twice before, was out of the question now, and finding more false papers for him would be both risky and difficult.

“Good luck to you,” he said softly to Maria Ignatevna, grabbing his bag and hurrying out without saying goodbye.

Maybe he was cross about something, Maria Ignatevna thought. She had little understanding of life in this country. She had been summoned from Byelorussia a year ago by a sick relative, but by the time she had filled in the forms and was ready to leave there was no one left to cure, so she crossed the ocean with her magic powers and contraband herbs for nothing. Not for nothing, in fact, because here too she found admirers of her craft, and she practised her unlawful and
unlicensed healing activities without fear of the consequences. No one could tell her anything about taxes or licences, she was amazed by the way things were done here; she treated people, she snatched them from the other world—what did she have to fear?

When Nina first met her in the small Orthodox church in Manhattan, she knew immediately that God had sent this wisewoman to her for Alik. She had turned to the Church a year or two earlier, before he fell ill, thus dealing a severe blow to superstition, and deciding that her beloved Tarot cards were a sin, she had given them to Gioia.

Maria Ignatevna was now beckoning to her from the kitchen. She hurried in, poured orange juice into a glass, topped it up with vodka and threw in a handful of ice-cubes. She always drank the American way now: weak, sweet and ceaseless. She mixed it with a swizzle stick and took a gulp. Maria Ignatevna stirred her tea and laid the spoon on the table.

“Now you listen to me,” she said sternly. “He must be baptized or nothing will work. I mean it.”

“He doesn’t want it, Maria Ignatevna, how many times do I have to tell you, he doesn’t want it!” Nina flared up.

“No need to shout,” Maria Ignatevna’s eyebrowless face furrowed. “I’m going home soon anyway. My bit of paper’s used up.” (By this she meant her long-expired visa, but she could never remember a single foreign word.) “The paper’s used up. In a couple of days I’m leaving, they’ve already punched my ticket. You must fetch the priest, otherwise I shall give up on him. If you do, I’ll work with him, Nina, one way or another, even from back there. If not, there’s no hope.” She flung up her arms melodramatically.

“I can’t do anything, he doesn’t want it. He just laughs. Fine, he says, let your God take me, as I am unaffiliated with any party.” Nina bowed her frail little head.

Maria Ignatevna opened her eyes wide. “What’s wrong with you, girl? What does the good Lord care about the party?”

Nina waved dismissively and gulped the rest of her drink.

Maria Ignatevna poured herself more tea. “I’m sorry for you Nina, I really am. Our Lord has many mansions. I’ve seen lots of good people, even Jews, all sorts. He has a place for all of them. Take my Konstantin, may he rest in peace. He was baptized, and now he’s waiting for me where all should be. I’m no saint, I lived with him for only two years and I was widowed at twenty-one. I got up to a few things, I admit it, I’ve sinned. But he was my only husband and now he’s waiting for me there. Do you see what I’m getting at? If you want to be with him when you get there he has to be baptized, unconscious if need be.”

“What d’you mean, unconscious?” Nina was taken aback.

“We must get away from everyone,” Maria Ignatevna hissed. And although the others were gathered around Alik at that moment and the kitchen was empty, she pushed Nina into the lavatory. Here she sat on the pink seat-cover of the toilet, while Nina perched on the plastic laundry-box and listened to her instructions in this most inappropriate of settings.

Soon Faika arrived, strong as a nutcracker, with a woody face and pale wiry hair that stuck up like pieces of straw. She was
one of the most recent arrivals in America, but she had acclimatized quickly.

“Hey, I’ve bought a new camera!” she announced from the door. Going over to Alik she waved the box above his motionless head. “It’s a Polaroid with a reversible film! You’re going to have your picture taken!”

There were many things in this country which Faika had yet to try, and she was in a hurry to buy everything, taste everything, check everything out and form opinions.

Valentina fanned Alik with the sheet, making a breeze over him, but he was the only one of them who wasn’t too hot. Throwing the sheet aside, she slipped behind him and sat with her back against the headboard, pulling him up so that his dark auburn head rested on her solar plexus, where according to her late grandmother the “little soul” had its home. All of a sudden, tears of pity welled up for his poor head, lolling helplessly against her chest like a baby who hasn’t yet learnt to hold it up. Never in their long affair had she felt such a keen, searing desire to hold him in her arms, to carry him, or better still to hide him in the depths of her body and protect him from this damnable death which had already so manifestly touched his arms and legs.

“Gather around girls, the cock has crowed!” she cried with a smile on her lips, hanging her celebrated breasts in their red packaging over Alik, and wiping the sweat from her forehead and the tears from her cheeks.

Gioia sat on one side of the bed, bending Alik’s leg at the knee and holding it up with her shoulder. On the other side, for photographic symmetry, sat Teeshirt.

Faika turned the camera over, looking for the viewfinder. She finally squinted through it. “Oy Alik, your balls are in the way, cover them up!” she ordered.

The tubes of his urine-bag were in the foreground.

“Cover up such loveliness? What an idea!” Valentina snorted.

Alik twitched a corner of his mouth. “Precious little use for it now,” he said.

“Wait, Faika,” Valentina said. Pushing two large Russian cushions from Nina’s trousseau behind his back, she moved down the bed and started gently peeling the pink plaster from the tender spot to which the catheter had been attached.

“Let him rest a bit and run free,” she said.

Alik smiled; he liked jokes, even second-rate ones. Valentina worked quickly, with a practised hand; there are women, born nurses, whose hands know everything in advance and don’t need to be taught.

Unable to bear any more, Maika jumped up and left the room. Last year she had had sex, first with Geoffrey Leshinsky then with Tom Caine, and she had come to the conclusion that she didn’t need it for anything in the world. But for some reason she felt shaken by Valentina’s ritual with the catheter, and the way she fingered him, and why were they all over him like that?

The shower happened to be free at that moment. As she stepped out of her shorts she felt the small rectangular box through the material. She wrapped everything up carefully, to make sure nothing fell out. She remembered every word of her instructions. She had spent last night beside Alik, not the whole night, just a few hours. Nina had gone off to sleep in the studio, but Alik hadn’t slept; he had called for her, she had agreed to do everything he had asked, and now, that little box was proof that she really was the one who was closest to him.

The heat had warmed the water in the pipes, and all the towels were wet. Drying herself as best she could, she slithered
into her clothes and slipped out of the apartment: she didn’t want to be photographed with him, she knew that.

Going down to the Hudson River, she made for the ferry pier and thought about the one normal adult who as though to spite her was now about to die, leaving her alone again with the innumerable idiots—Russians, Jews, Americans—who had surrounded her since the day she was born.

Something had happened to Alik’s vision. Things disappeared and sharpened simultaneously. Densities altered and expanded. The faces of his friends became liquid, and objects flowing. But this flowing was pleasant rather than unpleasant, and revealed the connections between them in a new way. The corner of the room was cut off by an old ski, from which the dingy white walls ran off cheerfully in all directions. These undulations were halted by a female figure sitting cross-legged on the floor, touching the wall with the back of her head. This point, where her head touched the wall, was the most stable part of the picture.

Someone had raised the blinds and the light fell on the dark liquids in the bottles, shining green and gold on the window-sill. The liquids stood at different levels, and this xylophone of bottles suddenly recalled a youthful dream. In those years he had painted many still lifes with bottles. Thousands
of bottles. Maybe more than he had drunk. No, he had drunk more. He smiled and closed his eyes.