The Funeral Party

by Ludmila Ulitskaya

“I’m going to study art,” she decided, forgetting that she had already dedicated herself to Tibet last week.

  The paintings she liked best were the small and medium-sized ones, but one large work begged to be displayed on the end wall. She called Gioia and Lyuda over to give her a hand, and they hung up the three-metre canvas which for five years had stood with its face to the wall. There was a lot going on in the picture, possibly too much: an autumn party with grapes, pears and pomegranates, dancing women and children, jugs of wine, distant hills, a man walking under an awning …

  Lyuda sliced cheese and sausage and made salads. Gioia dreamily laid out special dishes of quasi home-made Russian-Jewish food from the emigré grocer: herring, pies, meat in aspic, the salad known by Russians as Olivier salad and by everyone else as Russian salad.

  The guests arrived all at once and in a large crowd; the service lift bore them up in three shifts. About fifty people sat around the table, made from boards and various bits of timber; the rest took their plates and glasses and wandered around like guests at an American cocktail party. It seemed strange that this concentration of people could produce such a feeling of emptiness.

  The Washington gallery-owners were also present. They walked around the studio as though at an exhibition, examining the paintings with a dissatisfied air. Ten minutes later, before the drinking started, they kissed Nina’s hand and took their leave.

  Irina watched them go without pleasure. They still hadn’t given Alik his money or returned his paintings; she would definitely have to proceed with her lawsuit against them.

  Faika turned out to be one of those experts on ritual who are invariably to be found at weddings and funerals. She poured a glass of vodka, covered it with a piece of black bread and set it on a plate. “For Alik!” she cried.

  This was how things were supposed to be done.

  At the table people murmured expectantly; there were no loud conversations or splashes of separate voices, just a monotone hum and the jingle of glasses. They poured the vodka.

  At that moment Maika appeared at the door. She was pale, with a swollen mouth and pink nostrils, and she was wearing a black teeshirt with an orange-yellow inscription. Her sweaty hand gripped the plastic box in her pocket; now it was time for her to take it out.

  Nina perched on the arm of the white armchair, although no one was sitting in it. Fima stood, raised his glass and started to say something.

  “Listen everyone!” Maika broke in.

  Irina froze: she could expect anything from her strange little girl, but not a speech.

  “Listen everyone! Alik asked me to give you this!”

  Everyone turned to look at her; her face was crimson, like reagent paper during a chemical reaction. Next minute she squatted on her heels and pushed a tape into the cassette-player which stood on the floor. Almost immediately, without a pause, Alik’s clear, high voice rang out: “Boys and girls! My Pussy-cats and Cuckoos!”

  Nina gripped the arm of her chair. Alik’s voice went on: “I’m right here with you! Pour the vodka! Let’s drink and eat, like we always do!”

  In this simple, mechanical way he had broken down the eternal wall which separated him from them, casting a pebble from that other mist-covered shore and slipping away from it for a moment, stretching out a hand to those he had loved without recourse to the crude magic of necromancers or mediums, moving tables or restless plates.

  “There’s just one thing I beg you, no fucking tears, okay? Everything’s fine, just as it should be!”

  Gioia sobbed loudly. Nina sat as though turned to stone, her eyes bulging. The women, ignoring Alik’s request, simultaneously burst into tears, and a few of the men allowed themselves to join in. Fima took from his pocket the checked rag he used as a handkerchief.

  It was as if Alik could see them: “What’s wrong with you people? No tears, I said! Drink up! Mud in your eye! Nina, drink to me! Teeshirt, stop the tape a moment, darling!”

  There was a pause. Maika didn’t press the button immediately, only after Alik’s voice rang out again: “Drink up! That’s better!”

  She wound the tape back.

  They drank standing up, without touching glasses, and the vast emptiness which comes after death receded a little and was filled by a sort of deception, but to their surprise it was filled nonetheless.

  Irina leaned against the door-frame. She had already done all her weeping for Alik, yet something still tugged at her. What had been so special about him? Was it that he had loved everyone? But how had that love showed itself? Had he been a good artist? But surely if you didn’t sell, it meant you were no good? He had been an artist in his life perhaps; yes, he had lived as an artist. So why hadn’t she lived as an artist? Why had she pushed boulders uphill, overcome all obstacles and earned a pile of money? Because you weren’t with me my friend, she thought. Where were you?

  “Have you drunk up?” Alik spoke again. “Please, everybody get well and truly smashed. Enough with the sad faces, why don’t you dance? Yes, I know what I wanted to say: Fima and Libin, if you don’t make up your stupid quarrel today you’ll be in the shit. There’s so few of us, so few.… Drink to me, both of you, and quit quarrelling!”

  Libin and Fima, boyhood friends who had once played in the same yard together, looked at each other across the table and smiled at Alik’s belated curses. They had already made up during the hot months of summer. In the crowds and excitement of the past few days, with the tanks, the shooting, the coup in Moscow, remarks directed at no one in particular had landed in the right place, and the old resentments had melted away.

  “They’re not touching glasses, they’re not touching glasses!” Faika twittered.

  “Wait, they’ve got paper ones.” Valentina poured the wine into glasses and they knocked together clumsily, with a muffled ring.

  “Here’s to you, old roughneck!” cried Fima.

  “Here’s to the brassière!” Libin said, and both remembered the white brassière with large bone buttons and wire clasps sewn on with thick thread, which they had seen as boys in Kharkov after the war, in the life before last.

  “My friends, I can’t thank you, because no such thanks exist,” Alik’s voice went on. “I worship you, all of you, especially the women. I’m even grateful for my damned illness. If it wasn’t for this I’d never have known how good you are. No, that’s a stupid thing to say, I’ve always known. I’d like to drink to you. To you Nina, bear up! To you, Teeshirt! To you, Valentina! Gioia, to you! Pirozhkova, I love you. Faika, thank you Pussy-cat, you took some wonderful photos. Lyuda, Natasha, all of you. Men, to you! There’s just one thing—I want this party to be happy. That’s all, fuckit.”

  The tape turned, rustling slightly. There were no more words, just a few wheezing gasps. Nobody drank. Everyone stood silently holding their glasses, listening to the convulsive gulping for air and the Indian music bursting on to the tape from the street below.

  Everyone strained their ears hoping to hear something else of importance, and it turned out that it wasn’t quite the end: the lift clanged, a door banged, then Alik said, “Okay Teesh, stop the tape,” in an everyday, tired voice without a trace of pathos. There was a click, then silence.

  The merriment didn’t happen at once. For a while things were too quiet. Alik, as usual, had done something unusual. Three days ago he had been alive, then he had died; now he occupied some strange third position, and everyone was in a state of grief and shock about it, although they didn’t hold back on the alcohol.

  People came and went from the table carrying plates and glasses, coming together in groups and moving away again. There had never been such a mixture of people. Alik’s musician friends came, along with several people whom no one had seen before; it wasn’t clear where he had picked them up or how they had learnt of his death. The Paraguayans stood in a solid phalanx, led by their leader with his dark-pink scar and craggy, handsome face. A Columbia University professor talked animatedly to the driver of the garbage-collection truck. Be
rman fancied Gioia, but pressures of work meant he hadn’t touched a woman for over two years and he wasn’t sure if he should let the genie out of the bottle now. If he had known what Alik knew he certainly wouldn’t have contemplated it, for not only was she a virgin, she was also the scion of a noble Roman family which was mentioned by Tacitus.

  Nina asked someone to get a grey box down from the attic. Inside were priceless treasures, sent over long ago from Russia via diplomatic friends: this was the first jazz to make its way behind the iron curtain and back. Among the ancient heavy black pancakes were homemade ones, on x-ray plates, and a few brown spools with the first tape recordings.

  Only Alik knew how to dance the tango properly, whose complicated steps, heady swoops and swooning falls led so logically in the fifties to rock and roll.

  Now Libin took Alik’s place with Nina. He stepped out jerkily, twisting and turning, but he didn’t have the necessary artistic languor to give the tango its special aroma. The black saxophonist fancied pale Faika, and she felt torn: like most Russian emigrés she was a racist, yet the man before her was one undoubtedly American product she hadn’t yet tried.

  The party slowly came to life. Those who were offended left. Berman and Gioia left too. Both had made their decision but were unsure if it was the right one. Gioia was shaking with nerves, terrified that she would become hysterical when the moment came. But everything happened beautifully, and by morning each realized that they hadn’t lived all these years alone in vain.

  Shortly after ten o’clock the landlord came back, accompanied by a flustered Claude. He had informed his boss of his tenant’s death, and after waiting a couple of days, leaving what he considered to be a decent interval, the man arrived to inform Nina that the apartment was to be vacated on the first of the month.

  When he came up to her to hand over the document in person, she mistook him for someone else. Kissing him she told him in Russian to find himself a glass, and absent-mindedly dropped the letter on the table, from where it fell to the floor. It didn’t occur to her to pick it up. The disgruntled landlord shrugged and left; Claude tried in vain to persuade him that he was present at a traditional Russian wake.

  Someone put on an old tape, a humorous version of a Moscow jazz hit from the late fifties:

  Moscow, Kaluga, Los Angeles

  Joined in a big collective farm

  On the hundredth floor in St Louis

  Russian Vanya plays a riff …

  Everyone smiled at this old music, Americans and Russians alike, but it meant much more to the Russians: because of it they had been attacked at meetings, expelled from schools and colleges. Faika tried to explain all this to her partner the saxophonist, but she couldn’t find the right words; how could you explain it, when everything was so sad? Suddenly, a sort of hilarity would break through, something sweet, a kind of physical joy, yet their hearts were still heavy with sadness. This was what drove them on.

  Lyuda already felt so much at home in this place that after a few drinks she forgot where she was and jumped up to run over to her neighbour Tomochka to pour her heart out, forgetting that Sredne-Tishinsky Street wasn’t around the corner.

  “Mum, you’re so funny when you’re drunk. I’ve never seen you like this, it suits you.” Her son pulled her away from the door.

  Maika went over to Irina and touched her shoulder.

  “Let’s go, I’ve had enough.”

  Her face was stern.

  Lean Irina took off down the street after her doughy daughter, and suddenly realized that something was happening between them, had happened already maybe: it was as if the tension of the last years, when she had constantly felt her little girl’s sullen dissatisfaction with her, had dissolved and disappeared.

  “Mum, who’s Pirozhkova?” Maika asked.

  This was the first time she had heard this surname.

  Irina didn’t answer at once, although she had long prepared herself for this moment. “I’m Pirozhkova,” she said at last. “We had an affair when we were very young, at about the same age you are now. Then we quarrelled. Years later we met up again. It didn’t last long, and in memory of the meeting Pirozhkova kept his baby.”

  “Good for Pirozhkova,” Maika nodded. “Did he know?”

  “Then, no. Later, maybe.”

  “Good parents,” groaned Maika.

  “Don’t you like them?” Irina stopped walking; she was still hurt by the things her daughter didn’t like.

  “No, I do. Other parents are worse anyway. He knew of course.” Maika’s voice was weary and adult.

  “You think so?” Irina was startled.

  “I don’t think, I know,” Maika said firmly. “It’s terrible that he isn’t here.”

  The hum of Russian and English voices was broken by a sudden shriek. Flinging her black Chinese slippers off her feet, Valentina ripped off the top button from her yellow shirt with a gesture reminiscent of a dashing guitarist striking a chord. A shower of buttons fell to the floor as she strode out shuffling her thick pink ankles, her face shining like a lacquered Russian doll, and sang in her high, seductive voice:

  Hey there boy!

  Stir your tar

  I’ll mix my dough

  We’ll mix and stir together!

  She slapped her thighs and nimbly stamped her feet on the dirty floor. She had spent her student years in a whirl of field trips through northern Russia, collecting fragments of living Russian speech in Polesye, around Arkhangelsk and the upper reaches of the Volga, studying her bawdy folk-songs the way others study the nucleus of a cell or the movement of migrating birds. She remembered ditties by the thousand, in all their innumerable variants, dialects and intonations, and she had only to open her mouth for them to come pouring out, alive and unspoilt, as though she had just come from a village party:

  Spit on my iron,

  My iron is hot …

  She scattered little lumps of burning coal around her, and her dark heels drummed the floor as though stamping on them as they fell from the stove.

  The Paraguayans were beside themselves with joy, especially their leader.

  “What kind of music is this?” the saxophonist asked Faika, but she had no words to describe it and merely said, “It’s Russian country music.”

  Shortly before Valentina’s folk number, Nina had walked dramatically to the bedroom, her head high, her back straight. As she sat on the edge of the bed in the semi-darkness she heard the jingle of glass, and realized that she wasn’t alone. Squatting in the corner with his back to her she saw Alik, going through the remaining bottles, looking for something.

  She was unsurprised, but didn’t move from her place.

  “What are you looking for, Alik?”

  “There was a small bottle here, of dark glass,” he grumbled.

  “There it is,” she replied.

  “Ah, so it is.” He stood up, happily clutching the dark bottle to his old red shirt.

  Nina wanted to warn him to be careful, because the mixtures left disgusting brown stains. But he walked right past her, and she saw that he really was fully recovered and was moving exactly as he used to, with his old light step, slightly disconnected at the knees. There was more. As he passed her he touched her hair, not carelessly but in the old special way he had, parting his fingers like a comb, lightly pushing them into the roots and drawing them back from her forehead to the nape of her neck. And again she saw her cross hanging on his chest, and she realized that everything was all right.

  “I must tell Valentina,” she thought as her head touched the pillow.

  She wouldn’t have been able to find Valentina, for Valentina was far away. In the shower-compartment of the bathroom, the squat, muscular Indian was pounding into her with his short, massive organ. She saw his black hair falling over his sunken cheeks, and the livid strip of skin stretched tightly over the scar. Her wrists and ankles felt encased in iron, yet she was suspended, unsupported, hammered powerfully upwards … What was happening to her was unlike anyt
hing she had ever experienced before.

  TWENTY-ONE

  The telephone woke Irina in the middle of the night.

  “It’s probably Nina calling up drunk,” she thought, picking up the receiver. She glanced at her watch: it was just after one a.m.

  But it wasn’t Nina, it was one of the gallery-owners, the one who did the paperwork.

  “An urgent matter has arisen regarding your client,” he said briskly. “We wish to acquire all the remaining works in his studio without further delay.”

  Irina held the pause, as she had been trained to.

  “Of course, we assume you’ll halt all legal proceedings,” he went on. “Our relationship will now be reviewed.”

  One, two, three, four, five … Get this!

  “Well, in the first place, as regards legal proceedings, that is a matter quite separate from the other issue, and we couldn’t under any circumstances connect the two. As regards my client’s work, I can discuss that with you at the end of next week after I return from a visit to London in connection with these works,” Irina lied, with great professional satisfaction.

  She wasn’t the least bit tired. Getting up, she walked into the living-room. Two strips of light poured from under Maika’s door. She knocked and went in.

  Maika, wearing a long nightshirt despite the heat, propped herself up on one elbow and pushed away her book. “What’s the matter?”

  “It seems Alik was a good artist after all. Those sharks just called and want to buy all his paintings.”

  “You mean it?” Maika smiled.

  “Yes. I’ll dig out an inheritance for you yet, my girl.”

  “You’re joking, what inheritance? And what about Nina?”

  “Nina’s no concern of mine. And we’re going to have to work like hell for that money.” Irina’s face was very tired, and it seemed to Maika that she was ageing, and at night, without makeup, her mum didn’t look beautiful at all, just ordinary.