The Funeral Party

by Ludmila Ulitskaya

  In Alik’s pictures of this time the pomegranates appeared singly, in pairs or in groups, with different elongations and foreshortenings. It almost seemed as though in producing these simple changes he might reveal new, undiscovered numbers within the known numerical sequence—between seven and eight, say.

  Irina lived for eighty-eight days in Alik’s studio. They ate, talked, made love, took warm showers—that summer too had been hot, and the pipes had heated—and everything was happiness, or rather the beginning of happiness, because it was impossible to imagine that it would ever end. Scott Joplin’s compositions spilled through the night air.

  Irina’s lips swelled with softness: she knew immediately that she was pregnant, her whole body from her head to her feet was filled with a new physical happiness. Alik didn’t know; if he had, he might have acted differently. As it was, he was awaiting the arrival of Nina. He had divorced her before he left Russia, although he wasn’t sure if this had been a joke or for real. Since her father would never give her permission to leave while he was alive, Alik had decided to go alone. His departure tipped Nina over the edge of her quiet madness, and she had tried to kill herself (it was her second suicide attempt). She sat in the hospital making endless telephone calls and finally found a phoney American who was prepared to marry her, after which she applied to live with him permanently in America; such documents often involved years of running around.

  Irina and Alik were sitting in the loft one evening. Alik took a knife and sliced a large red watermelon in two. It fell apart and the telephone rang. It was Nina, announcing that she had received permission to leave and had bought her ticket.

  “Well, I don’t really see how I can get out of it now,” Alik said, putting down the phone.

  For Irina the whole thing came as a total surprise.

  “She can’t survive without me, she’s so weak,” Alik explained.

  Irina was strong. Hadn’t she walked on her hands to the edge of the roof? She wasn’t afraid of bosses or the authorities. He proposed renting a room for her with some friends of his on Staten Island, while he thought of a way to extricate himself from the whole crazy mess. He hadn’t reckoned on Irina’s pride, which had grown no less in the years they had been apart. A week before Nina arrived, when everything had been arranged with his friends, she left Alik’s apartment, as she thought for ever.

  EIGHTEEN

  Irina came out of the café and stood on the street, wondering what to do next; she must go home, Teeshirt was probably there already.

  Just then a van with an air-conditioner on the roof drove up to the doorway of Alik’s building and parked under the “No Standing At Any Time” sign. Two young men in uniforms jumped out, followed by a third man resembling a bald Charlie Chaplin, who minced after them with a suitcase.

  “The corpse-carrier,” Irina thought. “I’m going home.”

  Fima met the undertakers. Some stage management was required. He nodded to Valentina: “Keep Nina in the studio.”

  But Nina wasn’t going anywhere; she sat in the battered armchair and muttered enigmatically, mentioning herbs, Alik’s character and God’s will.

  The two sturdy young men and their puny boss shut themselves in the bedroom with Fima; it was sad that Alik couldn’t laugh at this comical trio, he thought.

  As they were running through the funeral arrangements, the two young men pulled from the suitcase a large black plastic bag, like the rubbish bags that line the streets every evening, and with three deft movements they slipped Alik inside as though putting shopping in a carrier bag. Charlie Chaplin stood watching.

  “Stop, wait a minute,” Fima said. “I don’t want his wife to see.”

  He went to the studio, pulled the unresisting Nina from her chair and carried her into the kitchen. Holding her gently against him, he brushed his unshaven cheek against her long neck, etched with tiny wrinkles, and said: “Well Bunny rabbit, what can I get you? Shall I run out for some grass?”

  “No, I don’t want to smoke, I want another drink.”

  He clasped her wrist and held it for a moment.

  “Do you want me to give you an injection? A nice little injection?” He stood barring the kitchen door with his broad back, trying to decide on the best cocktail to knock her out and disconnect her for a bit. As he did so the undertakers carried out the black bag, as though taking out the rubbish.

  Irina was already heading for the subway as the workers opened the boot of the van and pushed the black bag inside.

  Fima gave Nina an injection, and soon her eyes closed and she slept until morning on the same orange sheet from which they had just removed her husband. It was strange, but she didn’t once ask where he was, she merely smiled tenderly from time to time before falling asleep, and said, “You never listen to me, I told you he would get better.”

  People kept coming. Some didn’t know he had died, and had just come over to visit. A number of his friends arrived, including several from outside the city’s Russian-Jewish community. There was an Italian singer, one of Alik’s friends from Rome, and the owner of the café opposite, who brought Nina a cheque as he had promised. Libin, in accordance with Russian tradition, collected money. Some people from Moscow came, one with a letter for Alik, another saying he was an old friend. Some street people whom nobody knew turned up. The telephone rang, with calls from Paris and Yaroslavl.

  Father Victor, when he learned of Alik’s deathbed baptism, gesticulated in the air, shook his head and then said that everything was God’s will. What else could an honourable Orthodox man say?

  That morning, the day before the funeral, he picked Nina up in his old motorcar and drove her to the empty church—there were no services that day—and performed a funeral service for the dead man in his absence, who had been baptized virtually in his absence too.

  In a low, resonant voice the priest chanted the best of all words, invented for just this eventuality. Nina shone with angelic beauty. Valentina stood holding a candle behind her in a dusty shaft of light from the ceiling window, and absolved herself for having loved this other woman’s husband.

  As the last echoes of Father Victor’s voice died away in the dust-filled air, Valentina took from his hands a square packet containing some earth, a white ribbon with a prayer, and a small reproduction of an icon to put in the coffin. Then she grasped Nina’s trembling arm and pushed her into a taxi. Nina inclined her small head as she got into the battered yellow jalopy, as though it were a Rolls-Royce taking her to a reception at Buckingham Palace. This little bird has landed on my head, Valentina sighed. Lord, did I really hate her for so many years?

  NINETEEN

  The owners of Robins the Undertakers—formerly the Rabinoviches—had broken with traditional Jewish inflexibility in favour of a more humane and commercially justified tolerance. In the last fifty years the Jewish Funeral Society had become simply a funeral parlour, with four separate halls in which the sometimes exotic ceremonies of the different religions could take place. Only last week Mr Robins had put up a film-screen in one of these halls in the presence of the dead man, who had asked for a three-hour film of his concert performances to be shown to his relatives and friends before the funeral. (He was a tap-dancer.)

  The scenario for Alik’s funeral was comparatively simple: no religious service had been requested and no gravestone ordered, even though Robins owned a decent granite workshop. The mourners had, however, paid for a place in the more expensive Jewish part of the cemetery. It was a crappy plot, admittedly, right up against the wall, with no path running to it.

  The ceremony had been arranged for three o’clock. By ten to three, the lobby in front of the hall was packed with people. The present Mr Robins, the fourth incumbent of this thriving family concern which had never experienced recession, was a handsome old man with a Levantine appearance. He was intrigued. He believed the mourners at the ceremony could tell one everything about the deceased, and he found this psychological game one of the most attractive features of his p
rofession. This time he had difficulty in determining the client’s property status or even his nationality, indicated unambiguously, it would seem, by the family’s desire to bury him in the Jewish part of the cemetery.

  The crowd included several black people, rarely to be seen at Jewish funerals. To judge from their clothes they were from the artistic world. The face of one old man looked familiar, and Robins had the idea he was a well-known saxophonist; he couldn’t put a name to him but he had seen his face on TV and in magazines. Also present were a group of South American Indians. The white guests too were a complete mixture: solid Jewish couples, some superb Anglo-Saxons, evidently wealthy gallery-owners, and numerous Russians, respectable citizens and out-and-out scoundrels, who were also evidently rather drunk. A fourth-generation American, Robins had his roots in Russia, but along with the language he had long ago dropped his romantic attachment to this dangerous country and its crazy people.

  A most unusual client, Robins thought, he must be a musician; he had even made a detour across the funeral building to take a look at him.

  At exactly three o’clock Nina appeared in the doorway of the building, accompanied by Fima. Everyone took a deep breath, and let it out again. Her renowned gold and silver hair fell to either side from beneath a black silk hat with a wide veil. Above her short black dress she had thrown an ankle-length coat of translucent black toile. Her shoes were huge, seventies-style platforms with faceted heels.

  The gallery-owners groaned in ecstasy. “The best costume design in the history of time,” one whispered to the other. “It’s gorgeous. Alik always had stunning taste. If he’d gone into fashion we’d have had a designer of genius, rather than a passable artist.”

  “She’s a remarkable model,” agreed the other. “I noticed her three years ago.”

  “She’s old now,” the other said sadly.

  Fima’s pale-blue work shirt had symmetrical spots of sweat under the armpits. On his bare feet he wore sandals. As he led Nina in, he experienced sharply contradictory feelings of pity for the poor woman and revulsion for the role he was forced to play; he had little taste for amateur dramatics, and collecting the money for the funeral during the past two days had cost him a lot of bad blood already. Since Alik’s death she could remember only that he had got better, and that he was no longer alive. These two concepts would be unable to coexist in normal human consciousness, but in her little head, set brightly on its long neck, everything had changed place like a pattern rearranging itself behind the glass screen of a kaleidoscope, and now the pieces lay in a pleasing new order, separate and in no way interfering with one another.

  The words “death,” “he has died” and “funeral” rang constantly in her ears, but they didn’t penetrate this invisible screen; there was no place for them in the new pattern which had formed in her mind.

  Why had they brought her here? It had to do with Alik. Alik loved her to be beautifully dressed, and she had prepared herself carefully, giving much thought to this outfit she was wearing for him now.

  She walked on through the crowd of people without recognizing any of them. In her left hand she held to her chest a small black lacquered purse resembling a three-layered bagel. In her right she clasped the thick stalks of some lilies, which trailed their haughty white-and-green heads along the hem of her transparent coat.

  The throng parted before her and the doors of the hall swung open. Without slowing her pace, she walked on. Behind her everyone followed in a widening triangle. There were far more people than were usually accommodated in this hall, and most of them carried flowers.

  At the end of the hall stood the catafalque, and on top of this was a large open white box shaped like an eau-de-cologne bottle. Inside the box lay a vividly made-up doll looking like a red-haired teenager, with a small face and a little moustache.

  A man resembling an ageing television newscaster was already opening his mouth as Nina swept past. Clearly displeased at being upstaged by this extravagant widow, he stepped back.

  Lifting her veil, she leaned over the coffin and gazed at the badly sculpted puppet, made from some terrible, unrecognizable material, and she smiled a small smile of recognition: this was instead of Alik, she decided.

  She raised her head, and the gallery-owners standing next to her noticed a single black line carefully drawn down the center of her face, from the part in her hair through her neck and disappearing into her low-cut dress.

  “What class!” whispered one.

  “Ladies and gentlemen!” intoned the newscaster.

  It was a literal, word-for-word translation of the usual graveyard routine repeated beside the crematorium ovens by the fat lady in provincial black crimplene suit on the other side of the ocean.

  The coffin was customarily driven to the grave in the hearse by the attendants. But the plot was in such a crowded part of the cemetery that they had to carry it, stepping on other people’s graves as they went. Some thirty metres from the plot, the path stopped abruptly leaving a strip of earth a foot or so wide. The men walked ahead and formed a chain up to the excavated grave, and the white canoe sailed on, swaying perilously over their heads as it passed from hand to hand to its last resting-place.

  Nina stood by the pedestal of someone else’s gravestone, next to the fresh pit, where the earth had been neatly piled up in pink baskets. The powerful August sun drove a light breeze from the ocean, tugging at the black toile of her outfit and ruffling her faded-precious hair like a sail.

  Irina stood in the middle of the crowd. She had said goodbye to Alik a long time ago. Now something else tugged at her: she had found a father for her child. She hadn’t had much to do with it in fact, they had found each other. She just had to put cash into it—rather a lot of cash, which she wouldn’t get back. The grave too had cost quite a bit. But her little girl had had a beloved father, and this was his grave. Irina grinned: she had forgiven him for everything, but she hadn’t forgotten. She had given birth to her daughter in a paupers’ hospital while he was making love to Nina or that other heifer, Valentina, standing beside her now but half a step behind, knowing her place. Irina could never decide if Valentina was a devious bitch or just a good lay. How spiteful I’ve become, she thought. Alik, Alik, everything should have been different … But it hadn’t been, and that was all right.

  In this secluded part of the cemetery by the fence were numerous vertical gravestones; each horizontal was surrounded by vertical relatives, as though standing on one leg. The square, angular inscriptions giving the place of birth bore memories of clay slab and reed pen, all mixed up with a funny, gothically accented English, as though the stones carried in them the tastes of these long-gone people.

  Alik’s closed coffin rested on the adjacent grave. Robins, who had hurried up to honour his unusual client with his presence, commanded the diggers with a conductorly flourish to lower it down. Valentina whispered something to Nina, who opened her lacquered purse and removed the packet of earth. Moving her lips, she scattered the earth over the coffin in pinches, as though putting salt in soup. The gravediggers leaned on their spades.

  “Wait, wait!” came a shriek. Behind the mourners’ backs there was a sudden commotion. After much pushing and scuffling Gottlieb finally burst through, followed by a large number of bearded Jews, around ten in all. The party was rather late; they had poured out of their bus and had instantly got lost, since each had his own idea of where the cemetery office was. Now, pulling on their prayer shawls and phylacteries, treading on the women’s toes and pushing aside the men, they uttered the first words of the Kaddish: “May his great name be magnified and sanctified in the world that is to be created anew, where he will quicken the dead, and raise them up unto life eternal …” They chanted in their sad, shrill voices, although almost no one but Robins knew the meaning of their ancient lamentations.

  “Where did these ancient Hebrews come from?” Valentina asked Libin.

  “What do you mean? Gottlieb brought them.”

  What they
didn’t realize was that Reb Menashe had decided to take on himself the care of this poor “captive child.”

  The suspicion dawned on Valentina that the Jews were a little too theatrical; maybe they were from one of the small theatres in Brighton Beach. We must ask Alik, she thought, and instantly realized what a multitude of things she had nobody to ask about now.

  The funeral prayers were said, it didn’t take long. Then the people at the front stepped back from the grave, and the ones at the back trickled forward. The mountain of flowers grew until they reached Nina’s waist, and she stroked each flower, making a strange little house or mausoleum of them and smiling, so that people were now reminded of an ageing Ophelia.

  Everyone began to move away. The Jews pulled their prayer shawls off their black, sun-charred suits. They were now at the back, but Nina waited for them and invited them back to the wake. The oldest of them, whose skullcap was attached to his bald head with sticking-plaster, raised two withered hands to his face and spread his yellow fingers, saying sadly: “My child, Jews don’t sit and eat after a funeral, we sit on the earth and fast. Although it’s very good to drink a glass of vodka too.”

  They walked back across the cemetery in their steaming black suits and climbed into their minibus, on which were emblazoned the words “Temple of Zion” in dark-blue letters on the white.

  TWENTY

  Maika, Lyuda and Gioia hadn’t gone to the funeral. Maika was busy hanging Alik’s paintings. She pulled out the old ones, brushed off two years of dust and wondered where to put them. All at once, like a kitten on the seventh day, her eyes opened and she could see them clearly: this one here, that one next to it, that one above it, take that one away … Nothing had to be decided, she had only to look at them and they arranged themselves beautifully and intelligently for her.