Both knew that if lenders judged Berman’s brains, education, or speculative business project to be that creditworthy, then it was no more than his due; he could have moved to the fashionable Upper East Side of Manhattan if he hadn’t been so cautious with money.
Fima hunched into himself. It wasn’t exactly envy he felt, but something morbid stirred in his soul. To be fair, when Berman opened his laboratory he had offered him work as his lab assistant. But Fima would have had to take various special courses for this, and he was still poring over his English textbooks trying to convince himself that next year he would finally mobilize himself to take his damned exams. In a word, the amiable offer was refused; to accept would have meant his total and final capitulation.
Years ago in Russia they had been equals, two talented young doctors who knew their worth. Here, thanks to Fima’s inability to get his tongue round this damned language, Berman had shot so far ahead that Fima could never catch up with him. Now with Alik they were equals as before, two doctors attending the same patient.
Their meeting that night in Alik’s kitchen was actually more of a consultation. Alik had turned first to Fima when his right arm started letting him down two years ago.
“It’s nothing, just professional exhaustion—tendonitis probably,” was Fima’s first diagnosis. He had to revise this opinion when Alik’s left arm also started to seize up. If it hadn’t happened so suddenly Fima might have suspected multiple sclerosis. As it was, major tests were needed.
The first set of tests were carried out by Berman, free of charge, naturally; he even paid for the isotopes. Nothing showed up on the computer.
“It’s American, it won’t work for nothing!” Berman grimaced. “Better buy yourself some health insurance old man, while you still look okay. It’ll be valid in six months, you’ll need it, I guarantee, these things don’t just pass.”
Alik had no money for insurance, and he never thought about what was going to happen in six months’ time. This, plus his dislike of queues, forms and officials left over from Soviet times, was the reason he had never had any American benefits. While some of his fellow-emigrés vied to cadge as many hand-outs as possible, from food stamps to free rent, Alik had managed to live for almost two decades as free as air, working away on his own and out of sight and giving many of those who didn’t know him well the impression that he merely improvised as he went along. The people he annoyed most were not the honest grafters but the inveterate scroungers.
In short, he had never had a regular job or any insurance either, and there was no prospect of him getting either now: this was no time for him to be queuing for days in endless corridors and collecting the necessary paperwork.
Fortunately the computerized, efficient American health service left a few gaps, and his first tests were on someone else’s papers. The blood analysis showed nothing.
His first hospitalization was organized on the sidewalk: a little spectacle was staged, an ambulance was called. The owner of the café across the street from Alik’s building called the hospital, saying that a man had collapsed unconscious by his door. Lying across three chairs, dangling his auburn ponytail and winking at his friend the café-owner, Alik waited five minutes for the ambulance. He was driven off, examined, and treated on Medicaid by neuropathologists, who attached him to tubes and prescribed drugs. The hospital was depressing, and Alik discharged himself. Fima shouted at him: the prescriptions were fine, they were treating the symptoms, what more could they do without a diagnosis? Fima insisted he go back, and the only way to do this was to cook something up. He quickly arranged a small fistula on Alik’s collar-bone, and Alik announced that his condition had deteriorated after his unsuccessful treatment. The city hospital, although not private, disliked lawsuits and took him back.
It dragged on. Alik returned to hospital and discharged himself again. It wasn’t clear if the treatment helped, or how he would have been without it. His right arm hung lifeless, with the left he could barely lift a spoon to his mouth. His gait changed. He became tired. He stumbled. Then he fell for the first time. It all happened with frightening speed. The following spring he was barely able to move.
Alik’s second hospitalization was more difficult. He was taken to Berman’s laboratory and Berman himself called for the ambulance, saying that he had a seriously ill patient at reception. The ambulance demanded a written undertaking that the patient wouldn’t die on the journey. Berman, who knew all the bureaucratic tricks in this country, had already written it and accompanied Alik to the hospital. By a stroke of luck the nurse in charge turned out to be a friend of his, an old Irishwoman, frowning, abrupt, and a perfect angel. She sent them to the Chinese hospital, which was considered the best of the city’s state institutions. This was a good move. As well as the usual drugs Alik was given acupuncture and moxa, and in the first week he perked up a little and it even seemed as though some of the feeling returned to his arm.
Now Fima sat with Berman in Alik’s dingy kitchen with the dirty cups and happy cockroaches. They had already run out of hypotheses: amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a viral infection, some mysterious tumour.
Berman was rather good-looking, but there was something of the ape about him with his strong, stooping shoulders, his short inflexible neck and long arms; even his mouth was stretched tightly over his large teeth. Fima was all rough and gnarled; bright clear eyes looked expectantly at Berman out of his pitted face.
“It’s hopeless, Fima. There’s nothing to be done in these cases, just the oxygen mask.”
“Asphyxiation may progress slowly and painfully,” Fima frowned.
“Give him morphine, or whatever.”
“Right,” Fima muttered.
He had hoped clever Berman might know something he had forgotten, but such knowledge didn’t exist.
SEVEN
Father Victor arrived at about nine, without socks and in sandals, carrying an attaché case and a bulging plastic bag. He was wearing a baggy shirt tucked into light, shortish trousers and a baseball cap with the innocuous letters “N” and “Y” on it.
He took off the cap as he came in and rested it on the crook of his arm, greeting everyone with a smile which wrinkled up his short nose.
Because it was Saturday there was a large number of visitors: Valentina, Gioia with a little grey Dostoyevsky under her arm, Irina, Maika, Faika, Libin and his girlfriend, all the usual crowd. Also present were the Beginsky sisters, recently arrived from Washington, a woman from Moscow whom nobody knew, and who said her name so indistinctly they couldn’t hear it, Alik’s American artist friend Rudy, who had worked with him on some joint project, Shmuel from Odessa with a dog named Kipling which he was looking after for a few days for an old friend.
Alik was lifted from the bed and seated in his usual place in the armchair, propped up on all sides with pillows. Everyone circled around the room, talking loudly and drinking. On the table stood various offerings: a large pecan pie, some icecream. It was more like a private view than the room of a dying man.
Father Victor seemed lost for a moment. Then Nina grabbed his elbow which was supporting the baseball cap, and sat him down at the table.
“My heart, which longs so much for pea-eace …!” crooned Shmuel, almost drowning out the Paraguayan pipes and drums tirelessly banging away under the windows.
Faika clasped a long, limp puppet which represented Alik. This prophetic doll had been given to him once on his birthday by his friend Anka Kron, who now lived in Israel. Alik gave the puppet its lines: “Oy, don’t wink at me like that! In the name of God, Faika, have you been eating garlic?”
The priest smiled, took the puppet from Faika’s hands, and shook its pink hand: “Pleased to meet you!”
Everyone laughed, and Father Victor put the puppet back on Faika’s knee. Nina nodded. Shmuel was instantly silent. Libin lightly lifted Alik out of his chair and carried him like a child back to the bedroom.
The woman from Moscow shrank back: it was a pitiful sight. While Al
ik was sitting or lying down everything seemed normal, a sick man surrounded by his friends. But when he was moved from one place to another it was immediately apparent that something terrible was happening. The bright, lively eyes and the dead body. At the beginning of spring he had been able to move on his own from the studio to the bedroom.
Alik was put to bed, and Father Victor went into his room. Nina hovered around for a while, then slipped out and sat on the floor with her back to the door and a watchful, remote expression on her face; she was half-drunk, but composed.
This is totally stupid and pointless, Alik thought. He seems like a nice man, I should never have agreed to do it.
Father Victor sat on the stool, and leaned closer to Alik. “I am facing a number of professional difficulties here,” he began unexpectedly. “You see, most people I meet, my parishioners, are convinced that I can solve their problems, and that if I don’t it’s purely for their own good, as a sort of lesson. They are entirely mistaken.” He smiled a gap-toothed smile and Alik realized the priest understood the whole ridiculousness of the situation, and relaxed.
Alik’s illness caused him no physical pain. He suffered from increasing breathlessness and an unendurable sense of dissolving self. Along with the weight of his body and the living flesh of his muscles, the reality of life was slipping away, which was why he took such pleasure in the half-naked women clinging to him from morning to night. It was a long time since he had seen any new people around him, and this unfamiliar face, with its flecked, greenish-brown eyes, carelessly shaved right cheek and small, western-style beard, impressed itself on his memory in photographic detail.
“Nina wanted me to talk to you,” the priest went on. “She thinks I can baptize you, or, rather, persuade you to be baptized. I could not refuse her request.”
The Paraguayan music outside the window howled, rattled and gave up the ghost, then came back to life again. Alik frowned. “I’m not a believer, you know, Father Victor,” he said sadly.
“Stop, stop, what are you saying?” the priest waved an arm. “There are practically no non-believers. It’s just a psychological cliché you brought over with you from Russia. I assure you there are no non-believers, particularly among artistic people. The nature of faith varies—the greater the intellect, the more complex the form it takes. There’s also a form of intellectual chastity which won’t allow anything to be discussed or articulated. We’re surrounded by the most vulgar forms of primitive religiosity, and it’s hard to bear …”
“I’m aware of that, I have my wife here,” Alik replied. Father Victor’s seriousness had endeared itself to him. He’s not stupid either, he thought with surprise. Nina’s ecstatic remarks about the wise priest had always grated on him, but now his irritation vanished.
“For Nina, as for other women,” the priest gestured towards the door, “things pass not through the mind but through the heart, through love. They’re marvellous beings, miraculous, astonishing …”
“You love women, don’t you, Father Victor? So do I,” Alik spurred him on.
The priest appeared not to understand him. “Yes, I’m terrible about them, almost all of them,” he confessed. “My wife is always saying if it wasn’t for my vocation I’d be a real womanizer.”
What a simpleton, Alik thought.
But the priest warmed to his theme: “They’re extraordinary, they’re ready to sacrifice everything for love. At the centre of their lives is often love for a man—yes, there’s this substitution. But sometimes, just occasionally, I meet one of those rare women in whom possessive, insatiable human love is transformed, and through the everyday, the ordinary, they come to the love of God Himself. It never ceases to amaze me. Your Nina is one of those people, I think. I saw it as soon as I walked in today. You have so many beautiful women around you, so many good faces. Your friends aren’t leaving you. Beneath the surface they are all like the women at the tomb of our Lord …”
Father Victor wasn’t old, a few years the wrong side of fifty perhaps, yet his speech had an exalted, old-fashioned ring to it; he must be from the first, pre-war wave of emigration, Alik thought.
His movements were distracted and rather awkward. Alik liked that too. “It’s a pity we didn’t meet before,” he said.
“Yes, yes, it’s hot,” the priest responded irrelevantly, not wanting to abandon the female theme which so inspired him. “You know, one could write a dissertation on it—the different forms faith takes among men and women …”
“I’m sure some feminist has already done it,” Alik said. “Father Victor, would you please ask Nina to bring us two Margaritas? You like tequila?”
“I guess so,” the priest replied uncertainly.
He stood up and opened the door a little. Nina was still sitting there, with a burning question mark in her eyes.
“Alik wants a Margarita,” Father Victor told her. She didn’t understand immediately. “Two Margaritas.”
A moment later she was back carrying two large wineglasses. She went out again, shooting a bemused look over her shoulder.
“So, shall we drink to women?” Alik suggested in his usual friendly, sardonic tone. “You’ll have to hold the glass for me.”
“Of course, with pleasure.” Father Victor clumsily pushed the straw into his mouth.
He had seen a lot in his life, but nothing like this. He had heard people’s dying confessions, he had given them communion and even baptized some, but he had never given them tequila.
He put his own glass on the floor and continued: “With men, faith generally takes the form of battle. Remember Jacob’s wrestling in the night with the angel? The struggle for oneself, rising up to a higher level. In that sense I’m an evolutionist. Salvation is too utilitarian an idea, wouldn’t you agree?”
It seemed to Alik that the priest had got slightly drunk. Alik couldn’t see that he hadn’t in fact touched his drink. He himself felt a warmth in his stomach, and it was a pleasant feeling; he had fewer and fewer feelings nowadays.
“I believe the venerable Serafim Sarovsky called this battle for faith the seizing of the Holy Spirit. Yes …” Father Victor fell into a sad and thoughtful silence; at moments like these he realized clearly that he hadn’t the spiritual vocation his grandfather had had.
The South American music wearied of itself and stopped, and was replaced by a good, human noise outside the window.
How weak I am, Alik thought.
This brave, simple-hearted man had touched him somehow. Why did he give the impression of being brave? He would have to think about it. Was it because he wasn’t afraid of appearing ridiculous?
“Nina keeps begging me to get baptized. She pleads and weeps, it’s terribly important for her. For me it’s just a formality.”
“What are you saying? I find her reasons entirely convincing. But I simply don’t …” Father Victor threw up his arms in confusion, as though embarrassed by his privileges. “You see, I know for sure that between us a Third is present.” He became even more embarrassed and fidgeted on his stool.
A mortal weariness came over Alik. He couldn’t feel any Third present; this Third was something out of a fairy-tale, and it pained him that his foolish Nina felt it, and this simple-hearted priest felt it, and he didn’t feel it, sensing its absence with the same sharpness, perhaps, as they sensed its presence.
“But I’m prepared to do it for her,” he closed his eyes from deathly tiredness.
Father Victor wiped the sweaty base of his glass on his trousers and put it down on the table.
“I don’t know, I really don’t know. I can’t refuse you, you’re so ill, but something’s not right. Let me think. I know, let’s pray together. As best we can.” Opening his attaché case, he pulled out his vestments, slipped his surplice and stole over his clothes, slowly tying the fastenings. Then he kissed the heavy priestly cross, blessed by his late grandfather, and put it around his neck. As he did so he seemed to grow older, statelier. Alik lay with closed eyes and didn’t witness this
transformation. The priest turned to a small faded print of the Vladimir virgin tacked to the wall, then bowed his balding head and prayed: “Help me, Lord, oh help me!”
At such moments he always remembered himself as a small boy, standing on the football pitch behind the Russian children’s foster home outside Paris which his grandparents had run during the war, and where he had spent the whole of his childhood. And once again he was standing inside the tattered rope squares of the goal where they sent him, the youngest, when they had no proper goalkeeper, and he waited, terrified, knowing that he would be unable to stop a single ball.
EIGHT
Large Leva Gottlieb, with his shiny, black beard, ushered respectfully out of the lift a thin, handsome man, also tall and bearded, identical to Leva only four times narrower, like his reflected image in a distorting mirror. Irina practically burst out laughing, but she quickly regained her composure. Leva spotted her at once in the throng and pushed towards her, addressing her like an irritable husband: “I said I’d call you after the end of the Sabbath but your machine was on, it’s a good thing I wrote down your address …”
Irina clapped her hand to her forehead: “Jesus, I completely forgot that was Saturday evening! I thought it was tomorrow morning!”
Leva threw up his arms, then remembered the rabbi standing beside him. The rabbi’s face was both stern and curious; he didn’t know a word of Russian.
Maika stood by the table holding a paper plate with a large slice of pie, and stared at Leva. He charged at her like a wild boar and grasped her head: “Hi, mouse!” He kissed the head of this grown-up girl who had lived for two years in his house, whom he had sat on the potty, taken to nursery and called “daughter.”
“He’s shameless, completely shameless,” she thought, holding her head tensely in his stony grip. “I used to miss him so much, now I couldn’t care less. They’re morons, the lot of them!” She jerked her proud head and Leva sensitively released his grip.
The Funeral Party Page 4