The Funeral Party

by Ludmila Ulitskaya

  “Please Irina, it’s important,” Nina said in a completely clear voice.

  “I’ll come round tomorrow, okay?” Irina said, hanging up.

  Irina had felt a deep curiosity about Nina. This may have been the real reason she agreed to go to Alik’s studio one-and-a-half years ago, to see for herself this miracle in feathers that had got him.

  Since the day he was born, women had always adored Alik. At kindergarten he was his teachers’ pet. Later at school, all the girls would invite him to their birthday parties and would fall in love with him, along with their grandmothers and their grandmothers’ dogs. In his teenage years, when people are driven crazy with impatience for adult life to begin, and good little girls and boys rush into ridiculous adventures, Alik was indispensable: he listened to his friends’ confessions and was able to laugh at them and make them laugh at themselves. But his most rare and precious quality was his confidence that life would begin next Monday and that yesterday could be erased, especially if it hadn’t been totally successful. At the School of Performing Arts, where he was a student, even the inspector of his course, known as Snake Venom, proved susceptible to his charms. Four times he was expelled, and three times, thanks to her efforts, he was taken back.

  Nina struck Irina at their first meeting as a silly woman, stuck-up and capricious. Before her in the studio she saw a faded beauty seated on a dirty white carpet, doing a giant jigsaw puzzle and asking not to be disturbed. On closer acquaintance she turned out to be merely simple-minded, and psychologically unbalanced too; inertia alternated with hysteria, bouts of joy with melancholy.

  She understood why Alik had married her, but he had obviously had to put up with years of her mind-numbing silliness, pathological laziness and muddle. Irina felt not so much retrospective jealousy as a deep sense of puzzlement. She had never come across Nina’s type before. Her infinite helplessness clearly aroused in others, particularly men, feelings of heightened responsibility. She had another trait too: each of her whims, caprices and weaknesses she took to the limit. For instance, she refused to touch money, so that if Alik went to Washington for a week he would have to fill the fridge with food before he left, knowing that she wouldn’t go to the store and would rather starve than handle filthy banknotes. As well as this Nina never cooked, because she was afraid of fire. In Russia she had been keen on astrology, and had read that as a Libra she was in danger from fire. From then on she never went near the stove, fearful of the cosmic incompatibility of the air and fire elements. Here in Alik’s studio, where the stove was not gas but electric, and the only living flame she ever came into contact with was at the end of a match, her aversion to cooking remained as strong as ever, and Alik learned to be a successful and imaginative cook.

  Apart from money and fire there was something else, something more intangible, an insane, senseless fear of making decisions. The more insignificant the decision, the more Nina anguished over it. Irina once received some free opera tickets from a client who was a singer, and at Maika’s request they invited Alik and Nina along. They arrived to pick them up and witnessed Nina’s indecision as she tried on endless little black dresses and smart shoes, finally flinging herself on the bed, sobbing into the pillow and refusing to go, until Alik, avoiding the eyes of the involuntary onlookers, picked a dress at random and said: “Wear this one Nina, velvet and the opera go together like beer and sausages.”

  Maika evidently enjoyed this spectacle far more than she enjoyed the rather mediocre opera.

  Irina knew perfectly well the value of such antics; her youth had been full of them. But unlike Nina she had the circus school behind her. Tightrope-walking is a very valuable skill for an emigré, and perhaps this explained why she was the most successful of them. The soles of the feet hurt, the heart almost stops, the sweat pours into the eyes, but the muscles stretch to a wide, all-purpose smile, the chin tilts victoriously, the tip of the nose points to the stars—light and easy, easy and light.

  For eight years she had skipped precisely two hours of sleep every night, fighting tooth and nail for her expensive American profession. And now she had to make ten decisions a day and had long since learned not to get too upset if today’s proved not to be the best. “The past is definitive and irreversible, but it has no power over the future,” she would say at such times. And suddenly it turned out that her irreversible past did have power over her.

  Irina had had no discussions with Alik about his impending death or his past life, but what she hadn’t dared to dream about had taken place; her little girl talked with him and his friends so easily and freely that none of them had any idea of the complex psychological disorder she had suffered. And now Irina couldn’t explain to herself how she too had spent almost every free minute of her time for the last two years in his noisy, disorderly lair.

  An English goldfish named Doctor Harris (he looked more like a sunburnt tunny than a delicate veiltail), whom Irina had been discreetly dating for four years, had just visited New York for five days, almost failed to reach her and flown out disappointed, convinced that she was planning to drop him. But dropping him didn’t come into Irina’s plans. Harris was a renowned authority on copyright law. His status was such that in the normal course of events she would never have met him, and it was by sheer chance that one of the partners at her law firm decided to take her with him to England for a business meeting. Afterwards there was a party at which virtually no women were present, and she shone against the black dinner-jackets like a dove in a flock of crows. Two months later, after she had forgotten about the trip, she received an invitation to attend a conference of young lawyers. Her boss was at a loss to explain it, but could hardly suspect Harris of taking an interest in his diminutive assistant. He had let her go to Europe for three days. And now it turned out that Harris wanted to get married. It wasn’t just self-interest either, it was serious.

  Every woman who has turned forty dreams of a Harris, and Irina had just turned forty.

  It was all rather foolish really.

  The following evening Irina arrived to see Nina. Old Maria Ignatevna was in the bedroom, having called in for five minutes before her flight. Nina was scurrying around after her. The studio was filled with people as usual.

  Irina was hungry. She opened the fridge. There wasn’t much in there, just some expensive black bread wrapped in paper from the Russian grocer and a lump of stale cheese. She made a sandwich and drank some of Nina’s vodka and orange; everyone was drinking screwdrivers in this house for some reason. Finally Nina slipped out of the bedroom.

  “So what do you want Gottlieb for?” Irina asked.

  “Who’s Gottlieb?” Nina looked baffled.

  “Oh Lord, Nina, have you forgotten? You called me last night!”

  “Oh that, I didn’t know his name. Alik said we must get him a rabbi,” Nina said innocently.

  Irina felt a surge of irritation and wondered why she bothered with this imbecile, but she contained herself and asked in a professional tone: “Why a rabbi? Are you sure you haven’t made a mistake?”

  Nina beamed. “You don’t know anything! He’s agreed to get baptized!”

  Irina burst out: “But Nina, you need a priest to do that!”

  “That’s right, a priest,” Nina nodded. “I know. I’ve already arranged it. But Alik asked … he wants to talk to a rabbi too.”

  “He wants to be baptized?” Irina said in amazement, finally understanding.

  Nina dropped her narrow face into her bony, no longer beautiful hands. “Fima says it looks bad. Everyone says it looks bad. Maria Ignatevna says it’s his only hope now. I don’t want him to go off into nowhere, I want God to accept him. You can’t imagine what the darkness is like, it’s impossible to describe … ”

  Nina knew something about the darkness, having made three suicide attempts herself, one in her early youth, the second when Alik left Russia, and the third in America after her baby was stillborn.

  “We must do it quick.” She poured the remains of t
he orange juice into her glass. “Bring me more juice will you, Irina? We’re all right for vodka, Slavik bought some yesterday. Just get your Gottlieb over here with the rabbi.”

  Irina picked up her handbag and put her hand into the metal cruet on top of the fridge where the bills were kept, but it was empty: someone had already paid them.

  FIVE

  Irina told people she had backed every horse, including the Jewish one. The Jewish one was large, black-bearded Leva Gottlieb, who had pushed Russian Irina into Judaism. Not bits and pieces of Judaism either but virtually the full programme, with Sabbath candles, the ritual bath and the headgear, which happened to suit her very well. She was a Jew for two years; Maika was sent to a religious girls’ school, of which she still had fond memories, and Irina studied Hebrew. She was an able student, and it came easily to her. She went to synagogue and enjoyed family life. Then one morning she woke up and realized she was bored stiff. She packed a few things and went off with her daughter, leaving Leva a note consisting of two words: “I’ve gone.”

  He tracked her down to some old friends of hers, and when he asked her why she had broken up the family, she replied only: “Boredom, Leva, boredom.”

  It was her last extravagant act, maybe her last act of emotional defiance: she never allowed herself to do anything like it again.

  She moved to California. How she lived in these years was a mystery to her New York friends. Some suspected she had had a stash, others that she might be living off a lover, no one could work it out. By day she wore her English silk and linen suits, and at night she stuck on her feathers and sequins and performed her acrobatic act at a special club frequented by rich idiots. The circus school was a proper profession, not just some PhD. Thanks to this profession, at night she would twirl her legs, and by day she would toil away at law school. In those years she learned to get up every morning at six-thirty, take a three-minute shower instead of her usual forty-minute bath, and not to pick up the phone until the machine had told her who it was. She eventually finished her studies and graduated, and got a job as assistant to one of the partners at a reputable Los Angeles law practice.

  She had little contact with emigré circles in Los Angeles and she spoke American with a slightly English accent, on which she still had some work to do; it was rather chic in fact, but people who understand these things know that it is easier to lose one’s Russian accent altogether than to replace an English with an American one. She also expediently changed her uncomplicated Russian surname when applying for her American papers.

  She still had a few connections from her show career, and she brought several new clients to the practice. God knows what kind of clients they were, but her boss valued them. Before long he allowed her to handle a few small cases on her own, and she started winning them for him. For a young American her career would be considered pretty good; for a forty-year-old former circus acrobat from Russia it was brilliant.

  For Leva too the divorce turned out to be for the best. He married a nice Jewish girl from Mogilev, who didn’t have the experience of the circus behind her, or any other kind of experience either. Large, plump and wide-hipped, she bore him five children in seven years, which fully reconciled him to the loss of Irina.

  His sensible wife would say to her friends: “You know our men fancy shiksas, but not after they find themselves a proper Jewish wife!”

  This was the limit of her wisdom, but Leva wouldn’t have disagreed with it.

  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.

  SIX

  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.