The Funeral Party

by Ludmila Ulitskaya

  The rabbi was dressed formally in a worn black suit of a perennially old-fashioned cut, and a huge fancy-dress silk hat, which you could tell was fated to be sat on by every new arrival. Beneath its crooked brim, two thick, unharvested sheaves of hair dangled luxuriantly from his temples, refusing to lie in neat spirals. He smiled into his music-hall beard, and said in English: “Good evening.”

  “Reb Menashe,” Leva introduced him. “He’s from Israel.”

  Just then the bedroom door opened and Father Victor came out in his surplice. He was pink and sweating, his eyes sparkled.

  Nina threw herself at him. “What happened?”

  “Don’t worry, Nina. I’ll come back … Just read the Gospel with him.”

  “He’s read it, he’s read it. I thought you’d do it for him now!” Nina was annoyed; she was used to having her wishes carried out immediately.

  “Right now he’s asking for another Margarita,” Father Victor smiled ruefully.

  Seeing the priest, Leva gripped Irina’s wrist. “What is the meaning of this? Is it some kind of joke?”

  Irina recognized this ferocious look and understood before he did his sudden desire for her; she remembered how lovemaking with him was always best when she annoyed him first with some taunt or slight.

  “No, it isn’t a joke, Leva.” She gazed serenely into his eyes, holding back her smile and the wicked urge to lay her hand on his crotch.

  Hating himself for his feelings, he became even more irritable. His face went red and he turned away from her. “How many times do I keep telling myself not to get mixed up with you! It always ends up as a circus!” he hissed, his beard trembling with rage.

  It wasn’t true, it was just that she had hurt him terribly by leaving him, and his perpetually tired wife was bored by her marital duties; he kept vainly hoping to hammer some of Irina’s music out of her, but it wasn’t there, however hard he shook.

  “She’s not a woman, she’s a bed of nettles,” he snorted.

  Reb Menashe looked enquiringly at Leva. He knew no Russian, and nothing about Russian emigré life; there were plenty of Russians living in Israel now but no emigrés in Tzfat, where he lived. He was a sabra, his mother-tongue was modern Hebrew. He had studied the Judaeo-Islamic culture of the Spanish caliphate, he could read Aramaic, Arabic and Spanish, and he spoke English fluently, with a strong accent. Now he listened to these people’s soft speech, and they seemed very pleasant to him.

  Nina went over to the two bearded men. Seizing the rabbi’s hands in hers, she tossed her shining hair and said to him in Russian: “Thank you for coming. My husband very much wants to talk to you.”

  Leva translated into Hebrew. The rabbi shook his beard and glanced at Father Victor, who was taking off his surplice. “It amazes me how quickly the priest gets here in America,” he said. “A Jew hasn’t even had time to call the rabbi, and he’s already arrived.”

  Father Victor smiled across the room at his colleague from an inimical faith; his benevolence was indiscriminate and unprincipled. When he was younger, he had lived for over a year in Palestine, and he understood Hebrew well enough to give the appropriate response: “I too am one of the guests.”

  Reb Menashe didn’t lift an eyebrow; either he didn’t understand or he didn’t hear.

  Valentina pushed a glass containing a muddy-yellow drink into Father Victor’s hand. He sipped carefully.

  Out of habit, Reb Menashe averted his eyes from the naked limbs, male and female, just as he did in Tzfat when guffawing foreign tourists piled out of their buses on to the stones of his holy town, repository of the lofty spirit of mystics and kabbalists. He surveyed the people in the room. He had turned away from this life twenty years ago and had never regretted it. His wife Geula was now bearing his tenth child, but had never been naked before him so shamefully as these women here.

  “Baruch Ata Adonai …” he began the blessing out of habit, giving thanks to the Almighty for having made him a Jew.

  “Maybe you’d like something to eat first?” Nina suggested.

  Leva raised his hand in a gesture that indicated simultaneously alarm, gratitude and refusal.

  Alik lay in the bedroom with his eyes closed. On the inside of his lids, bright yellow and green threads coiled against a flat black background, making rhythmic, intelligible shapes. But although he had studied the ancient language of carpets, he was unable to grasp the basic elements of this moving pattern.

  “Alik, you have guests.” Nina came in, followed by the rabbi. Lifting his head, she wiped his neck and chest with a wet towel, then pulled the orange sheet off him and waved it over his flat, naked body. Yet again Reb Menashe was startled by this American shamelessness; it was as if they didn’t understand the meaning of the word. Out of habit he turned his mind to the place where it was first uttered. Genesis, Chapter Two: “They were both naked and were not ashamed.” Who were these children? Why had they no shame? They didn’t look sinful, on the contrary they looked innocent. Maybe we had forgotten how to read the Book? Or the Book was written for other people, capable of reading it differently?

  Nina raised Alik’s legs and joined them at the knees, but they flopped back.

  “Leave it, leave it,” he said without opening his eyes, looking at the last spiral of the pattern.

  Nina pushed a pillow under his knees.

  “Thanks, Nina,” he replied, and opened his eyes.

  A tall thin man in black stood before him with a quizzical look, tilting his head to one side so that the brim of his gleaming black hat almost touched his left shoulder. “Do you speak English, don’t you?” he said.

  “I do,” Alik smiled, winking at Nina.

  She went out of the room, followed by Leva.

  The rabbi sat on the stool, which was still warm from the priest’s buttocks. After hesitating a moment he placed his dusty hat on the edge of Alik’s bed, and sat doubled up as though folded in two, his beard falling on to his sharp knees. His huge feet in their worn rubber-soled slip-ons were positioned on the floor with their toes together and heels splayed apart. He was serious, concentrated. His small black skullcap was secured with an invisible hair-clip to his springy dome of greying black hair.

  “The thing is, Rabbi, I’m dying,” Alik told him.

  The rabbi cleared his throat and laced his long fingers together on his knees; he wasn’t particularly interested in death.

  “You see, my wife’s a Christian and wants me to get baptized. To become a Christian.” Alik went on, and fell silent. He was becoming less and less keen on this game, and speaking was increasingly difficult for him.

  The rabbi too was silent. He stroked his fingers, and finally asked: “So how did this foolishness enter your head?” He hadn’t found the correct English word, having meant another kind of foolishness, and added: “Absurdity, I mean.”

  “Absurd for the ancient Greeks maybe. But for the Jews isn’t it a temptation?” The speed of Alik’s reactions hadn’t deserted him, despite the dull numbness he had almost ceased to feel in his body, but had been feeling for the last few days in his face.

  “Should a rabbi know the texts of your apostle then?” Reb Menashe flashed his bright, happy eyes.

  “Is there anything a rabbi doesn’t know?” Alik parried.

  They went on, throwing out questions and not getting answers, as in a Jewish story, understanding each other better perhaps than in reality they should have. They had nothing in common, their upbringing and experiences had been quite different, they ate different food, spoke different languages, read different books. Both were educated people, but the spheres of their education barely intersected. Alik knew nothing of Kalam, the speculative Muslim theology which Reb Menashe had studied for the past twenty years, nor about Saadia Gaon, on whose works he had written his painstaking commentaries; and Reb Menashe knew nothing of Malevich or De Chirico.

  “You have no one but the rabbi to seek advice from?” Reb Menashe asked with proud, humorous modesty.

  “Can
’t a Jew seek advice before death from a rabbi?”

  In their joking conversation everything was beneath the surface; both understood this, and their banter brought them to the serious point which occurs when people connect, a connection which leaves an indelible trace.

  “I feel sorry for my wife, she’s crying. What shall I do, Rabbi?” Alik sighed.

  The rabbi removed the smile from his face; his moment had come. “Ai-lik!” He wiped the bridge of his nose and shuffled his large shoes. “Ailik! I have lived in Israel practically the whole of my life without leaving it, I’m in America for the first time. I’ve been here three months and it shocks me. I study philosophy, Jewish philosophy—it’s a completely special thing. For a Jew, at the heart of everything is the Torah. If he doesn’t study the Torah, he’s not a Jew. In ancient times we had this concept of the “captive child.” If a Jewish child fell into captivity and was deprived of the Torah, the Jewish way of life, education and upbringing, he was not guilty for this misfortune, nor was he perhaps even capable of understanding it as such. But the Jewish world must take responsibility for the care of these orphans, even those in their advanced years. Here in America I see a whole world consisting entirely of captive children. Millions of Jews living in captivity with the heathens. Never in the history of the Jews has there been anything like it. There have always been apostates, and those who are forcibly baptized—the captive children weren’t only in the times of Babylon. But now in the twentieth century there are more captive children than actual Jews. This is a process, and if it’s a process, the hand of the Almighty must be there. I think about it all the time, and I’ll go on thinking about it for a long time more. You talk about baptism. In other words, go from the category of captive child to that of apostate? But on the other hand you can’t be an apostate, because strictly speaking you’re not a Jew. The second is worse than the first in my opinion. But then again I may also say that I never had the choice.”

  How interesting that he had had no choices, Alik thought; I had them till they came out of my arse.

  “I was born a Jew,” Reb Menashe continued, shaking his thick side locks. “I was a Jew from the beginning and will be one to the end. It’s not hard for me. You have the choice. You can be nobody, which I understand to mean a heathen. You could become a Jew, which you have every reason to be by virtue of your blood. Or you can become a Christian, take the crumb that falls from the Jews’ table. I won’t say if this crumb is good or bad, only that history’s source for it has been extremely dubious. If one is honest, isn’t the Christian idea of the sacrificing of Christ, understood as a hypostasis of the Almighty, the heathens’ greatest victory?”

  He chewed his lip and looked quizzically at Alik again. “In my opinion you should at least remain a captive,” he concluded. “I assure you, there are some things which are for husbands to decide, not their wives. I can give you no different advice.”

  Reb Menashe stood up from the uncomfortable stool and suddenly felt dizzy. He craned over Alik from his full height, and began to take his leave: “You are tired, you must rest.”

  He mumbled some words in a language which Alik didn’t understand.

  “Wait, Rabbi, I’d like to drink to our leave-taking,” he said.

  Libin and Rudy carried him into the studio and sat him, or rather arranged him, in his chair.

  “He’s very weak,” thought Father Victor. “How near the miracle is. We should call out to the Lord. Lower him through the roof. God, why are we incapable of that?”

  He felt particularly sad, because he knew why.

  Leva was in a hurry to take the rabbi away, but Nina came up and offered him a glass.

  Leva refused firmly, but the rabbi said something to him.

  “Have you paper cups and vodka?” Leva asked Nina.

  “Yes, we have,” Nina was surprised.

  “Fill them up,” he said.

  Music drifted up from the street like the smell of drains. It was hot too, that New York heat which doesn’t diminish at night but raises the energy level towards evening so that many people are troubled by insomnia, especially foreigners, whose bodies carry in them the habits of other climates. This was the case with the rabbi: although accustomed to the heat of Israel, at least the part of it where he had lived in recent years, there the heat of the day would drop, giving people respite from the sun.

  Nina brought over two paper cups and handed them to the bearded men.

  “After this I’ll take you back to the university,” Leva said to the rabbi.

  “I’m in no hurry,” the other replied, thinking of his stuffy room in the hostel, and the long wait for fitful sleep.

  Alik sprawled in his chair. Around him were his friends, shouting, laughing and drinking. It was as though he wasn’t there, yet they were all focused on him and he felt this. He enjoyed the everydayness of life; like a hunter, he had spent his life chasing after mirages of form and colour, but now he knew there had been nothing better than these senseless parties where people were united by wine, friendship and cheerfulness in this studio with no table, where they laid a makeshift table-top on trestles.

  Leva and the rabbi sat in two wobbly easy chairs; in the years when Alik was moving in, the local rubbish-tips had been excellent, and the chairs and the settee were all from there. Opposite Leva and Reb Menashe hung a large painting of Alik’s, depicting the Chamber of the Last Supper, with a triple window and a table covered in a white cloth. There were no people seated at the table, just twelve large pomegranates, drawn in meticulous detail in delicate shades of lilac, crimson and pink, rough and full of seeds, their jagged, hypertrophied crowns and vivid dents evoking their internal partitioned structure. Beyond the triple window lay the Holy Land, seen as it is now rather than in the imagination of Leonardo da Vinci.

  Reb Menashe was not a connoisseur of art. He stared at the painting, and at first he saw only the bright-red fruits; it was an old debate precisely which fruit had tempted Khava, the apple, the pomegranate or the peach. The room portrayed in the painting was also familiar to him: the so-called Chamber of the Last Supper was situated directly on top of the tomb of David in the Old City.

  “All the same, the picture speaks of a purely Jewish chastity,” he decided, looking at it. “He has replaced the people with pomegranates, that’s his trick, poor man.”

  Reb Menashe had been born two days after the declaration of the state of Israel. His grandfather was a Zionist who had organized one of the first agricultural colonies. His father had lived for the underground army, the Hagana. The rabbi himself had both fought and dug the land. He was born under the walls of the Old City, by the Windmill of Montefiore, and the first view he remembered seeing from the window was of the Gates of Zion.

  He was twenty when he followed the tanks and entered these gates for the first time. The Old City still smelt of fire and metal. He had scrambled through it, exploring its maze of Arab streets, the roofs of the Christian and Armenian quarters. The Christian holy places of Jerusalem seemed dubious to him, as did many of the Judaic ones. The Chamber of the Last Supper aroused his particular mistrust: it seemed highly unlikely that this secret paschal meeting would have been organized over the bones of the Great King. But David’s tomb itself raised serious doubts. This astonishing world which he so loved, of weak white stone, fluctuating light and hot air, was filled with historical and archaeological implausibilities, unlike the world of bookish wisdom, which was organized with crystal clarity, without approximations or anomalies, rising intelligibly upward with paradoxically logical convolutions of great beauty.

  He had understood for the first time what this land meant for him when he left it. He was young then; he had graduated from university and had been sent to Germany to study philosophy. A year of concentrated study exhausted his interest in European philosophy, torn off from its living roots, which he recognized exclusively in the Torah. This ended the brief period of his academic education, and in the second half of his third decade, he embarked
on the traditional path of Judaic science which is more accurately called theology.

  He had married a silent girl who shaved off her vibrant auburn tresses the day before the wedding, and since then he had enjoyed the harmony which comes from a life whose every detail is regulated with clockwork precision, and from the intellectual rigours of being at the same time both teacher and pupil.

  His world had completely changed: the information which most people receive from radio, television and the secular press passed him by, and he was nourished by the ancient code of Shulkhan Arukh, the table laid for those who wish to partake of the Jewish spiritual heritage, and by the high-voiced clamour of his many children.

  Five years later his first book was published, an exploration of the stylistic differences between Saadia’s commentaries on Daniel and the Chronicles. Two years after this he moved to Tzfat.

  His world was biblically simple and talmudically complicated, yet all its facets connected, and his daily work with his medieval texts cast a shadow of the eternal over the present. Below him at the bottom of the mountain shone the blue Sea of Galilee, and he experienced a deep feeling of gratitude to the Almighty—Christians might call it Phariseeism—for the happy fate that had been granted to him of serving and knowing, and for the holiness of this land which appears to many as a dirty, provincial eastern state, but which for him was the undisputed centre of the world, in relation to which all other states with their histories and cultures could be read only as commentaries.

  The priest had already removed his surplice and was pushing through the crowd of guests towards him. “I hear you’ve come from Israel to teach a course of Judaics?” he asked in school-book English.

  Reb Menashe stood up. He had never talked to a priest before. “Yes, I’m lecturing on Judaeo-Islamic culture at the Jewish university here.”

  “They do some wonderful courses, I once read a book about biblical archaeology published by that university.” The priest broke into a happy smile. “Your Judaeo-Islamic theme is presumably developed in the context of the contemporary world by some sort of trade-off?”