“Trade-off?” Reb Menashe didn’t understand the expression. “No no, political parallels don’t concern me, I’m interested in philosophy.” He seemed agitated.
Alik called to Valentina. “Valentina, keep an eye on those two and make sure they don’t stay sober!”
Valentina came over, pink and plump, holding more paper cups to her chest. She put them before Leva, and the three men drank together. A moment later their heads came together, they nodded their beards and gesticulated. Alik looked at them with deep satisfaction and said to Libin: “I think I’ve successfully played the role of Saladin today.”
Valentina sought Libin’s eyes and nodded towards the kitchen. A moment later she was squeezing him into a corner. “I can’t ask her, you’ll have to,” she said urgently.
“I see, you can’t, so it’s down to me.” Libin was offended.
“That’s enough. We must pay right now, at least for one month!”
“We’ve only just been asking for money.”
“Just—a month ago,” Valentina shrugged. “Why should I fork out more than anyone else? I paid the phone bill last month, it was all out-of-town calls. Nina talks a lot when she’s drinking.”
“She’s only just given money,” Libin sighed.
“Okay, ask someone else then, how about Faika?”
Libin burst out laughing: Faika was up to her ears in debt, and there wasn’t a person in this room to whom she didn’t owe at least ten dollars. Libin had no choice but to go to Irina.
Money wasn’t just a mess, it was a disaster. In the years before Alik became ill he had sold few paintings, and now that he had stopped working and could no longer run around the galleries his income was virtually zero, or rather less than zero. Debts grew: those which had to be settled, such as rent and phone bills, and those which would never be paid, like medical bills.
As well as this there was another unpleasant story, which had dragged on for several years. Two gallery-owners from Washington had organized an exhibition for Alik and had failed to return twelve of his works. Alik himself was partly to blame for this, and it would never have happened if he had gone back to the gallery on the day the exhibition closed, as they had agreed, and taken everything back. But he was enjoying in advance the sale of three of his paintings, and had borrowed the money to go off to Jamaica with Nina, so he didn’t make the final day. Even when he came back he didn’t go immediately. The cheque for the paintings didn’t arrive for some reason, so he phoned Washington to find out why. They asked him where he had been, and told him the works had been returned and had had to be put in storage, since the gallery had no space for them. This was a barefaced lie.
Alik had asked Irina to help. Another fact emerged: when he signed the contract he had left his copy with the gallery-owners. This blunder gave them the upper hand and made them even more brazen, and there seemed to be almost nothing Irina could do about it. All she had was the catalogue of the exhibition, which contained information about the paintings and a reproduction of one of those that had ostensibly been sold. She embarked on the process of suing the gallery, and while the case creaked on she reluctantly made Alik out a cheque for five thousand dollars. She told him she had screwed it out of them; in reality she still was fairly hopeful of recovering some of the money.
It was the beginning of winter. When she gave Alik the cheque he was overjoyed: “I’m lost for words, I can’t thank you enough, now we can pay the rent and finally buy Nina that fur coat.”
Irina was furious; she hadn’t given him money she had earned by the sweat of her brow to buy fur coats. But there was nothing to be done, half of the money was blown on a coat. Nina and Alik were like that; they never did anything by halves.
“Bloody bohemians,” Irina fumed. “Perhaps they haven’t eaten enough shit since they’ve been here.”
Exhaling the hot breath from her lungs, she decided that she would help them in future with small sums, in response to their immediate needs. She was a single woman with a child after all, and not nearly as rich as they seemed to think she was; it was hard enough for her to earn the damned stuff in the first place.
When Libin came up to her she already had her chequebook out. Over time the small sums grew unnoticed, like children.
NINE
The bearded men walked out to the street. Gottlieb didn’t feel drunk at all, but he had forgotten where he had left his car, and the place where he expected to find it was occupied by someone else’s long-backed Pontiac.
“They’ve towed it away, they’ve towed it away!” Father Victor laughed like a child, without malice.
“You can park here, why would they tow it away?” Gottlieb said peevishly. “You wait, I’ll look round the corner.”
The rabbi displayed no interest in which car they would be driving him back in, he was more intrigued by what the funny man in the cap was saying: “With your permission, I’d like to go on,” Father Victor was in a hurry to share his thoughts with his unusual companion. “The first experiment was successful, you might say. The diaspora proved exceptionally valuable for the entire world. Of course you’ve brought back together what’s left of you over there, but so many Jews have assimilated, diluted, there are so many of you in all countries, in science, culture, the arts. In some ways I’m a Judophile. Every decent Christian must respect the chosen people. You understand how important it is that Jews have poured their precious blood into every culture, every nation. And from this what do we get? It’s a worldwide process! The Russians leave their ghetto, and the Chinese. Mark my words, from these young American Chinese we’re getting the best musicians, the best mathematicians. I’ll go further—mixed marriages! You see what I’m saying? It’s the creating of a new people!”
The rabbi appeared to understand quite well what his opponent was saying, but he didn’t by any means share his thoughts on the subject and merely chewed his lip. Three glasses or four. He couldn’t remember, at any event it had evidently been a lot.
“We’re living in new times! Neither Jew nor gentile, and in the most direct sense too!” the priest said happily.
The rabbi stopped walking and wagged a finger at him. “That’s it, that’s the most important thing for you isn’t it—no Jews.”
Gottlieb finally drove up in his car, opened the door for his rabbi, then rudely drove off leaving Father Victor alone on the street in a state of deep mortification. “Look how he twists things, I meant nothing of the sort.”
TEN
People didn’t so much disperse as melt away. A few stayed behind to sleep on the carpet. One of those on the carpet that night was Nina; this night was Valentina’s.
Alik fell asleep as soon as the guests left, and Valentina curled up at his feet. She could have slept there, but as though to spite her, sleep didn’t come; she had noticed that alcohol had lately had the strange effect of driving it out.
She had arrived in New York in November 1981. She was twenty-eight, 165 centimetres tall, and weighed 85 kilograms. She didn’t reckon in pounds then. She was wearing a black hand-woven wool-embroidered shirt from the Gutsul region of the Ukraine. In her cheap cloth suitcase she carried her completed dissertation, of no possible use to her now, a complete holiday costume as worn by a Vologda peasant woman from the late nineteenth century, and three Antonov apples which she was forbidden to import, and whose powerful smell emanated from her feeble case. The apples were intended for her American husband, who for some reason wasn’t there to meet her.
A week earlier she had bought her ticket for New York and had called to tell him she was coming. He seemed happy and promised to meet her. Their marriage was a fictitious one, but they were true friends. Mickey had lived for a year in Russia, collecting material on the Soviet cinema of the thirties and enduring a neurasthenic love affair with a little monster who humiliated and robbed him and put him through a hell of jealousy. He had met Valentina at Moscow’s fashionable philology school. She had taken him back to her place, given him valerian drops to drink
, fed him Russian dumplings and finally heard the shattering confession of a homosexual crushed by the incontrovertibility of his own nature. Mickey was tall and delicate-looking. He wept and poured out his anguish to her, keeping up a running psychoanalytical commentary all the while. Her heart melted, and she marvelled at the capriciousness of nature. During a brief respite in his two-hour monologue she asked him: “So you’ve never been with a woman then?”
It proved not quite so simple: when he was fourteen, his seventeen-year-old cousin from Connecticut had stayed in their house for a month and a half and had tormented him with her caresses, finally abandoning him in a state of exhausting virginity and indelible sinfulness.
This emotional tale, crammed with relevant details, seemed a little too literary to Valentina, and by the time it was over she was exhausted. Laying his hands firmly on her fine nipples, she raped him without any great difficulty and to his complete satisfaction. It remained the only such occasion in his life, but from then on their relationship assumed an unusual warmth and intimacy.
Valentina was experiencing her own emotional crisis at the time, having just been stunningly betrayed by the man she loved. He was a well-known dissident who had survived a stint in prison, and was widely regarded as a hero of irreproachable honesty and courage. But there was evidently a joint running between his upper and lower halves: the upper half was exemplary, the lower was vicious. With women he was insatiable and promiscuous, and he used all of them. His departure from Russia was mourned by many beautiful girlfriends of the most extreme anti-Soviet persuasion, and the lives of at least two illegitimate children would have to be sustained only by heroic legends about their father.
He had married an Italian beauty and left Russia in a blaze of glory, abandoning Valentina with her KGB “tail” and her unsubmitted dissertation. Big-hearted Mickey proposed a fictitious liaison, so they got married. For decorum’s sake they held the wedding in Kaluga, where Valentina’s mother lived, and from that day on she was reconciled with her daughter. She didn’t like her husband and referred to him privately as “the tapeworm.” But his American passport worked its charm even on her; at the print-works where she had worked all her life as a cleaner, no one had yet married their daughter to an American.
After waiting two hours for her husband at Kennedy airport, Valentina finally called his home. There was no answer, so she decided to go to the address he had given her. She asked some friendly Americans the way, and they explained that the place wasn’t in New York at all but in the suburbs. (She had picked up a few bits and pieces of English but they didn’t amount to much.) More or less knowing what she was doing, she set off for the address she had written down.
A sense of the complete unreality of what was happening freed her from normal human anxieties. However the future worked out, it was bound to be better than the past: behind her everything was cursed.
With these happy thoughts she boarded the bus. For some reason nobody took her money. She wondered if this was what the “land of the free” meant and was glad she didn’t have to pay; she had fifty dollars on her, and she would have to hold on to them if she was to track down her errant husband.
The sun was setting when after several small adventures and large impressions she got out at Tarrytown. She breathed in the evening air and sat down on a yellow bench at the bus station. She hadn’t slept for over thirty-six hours, everything was moving about in front of her eyes and her head was spinning from a sense of weightlessness and uncertainty.
After sitting there for ten minutes she picked up her case, walked out into a little square lined with parked cars, and asked a young man fiddling with the lock of his vehicle how to find the street she wanted. Without saying a word, he flung open the passenger door and drove her up a hill to a pretty two-storey house surrounded by well-tended shrubs. The light was fading. She stopped in front of a pair of white slatted gates.
Rachel, Mickey’s mother, had been bothered all morning by a wonderful dream she had had before waking. In it she had come upon a white wooden summer-house which didn’t exist in their garden, where a sweet, plump little girl had talked to her about something very important and pleasant, even though she was only tiny and in real life small children don’t talk like that. What she had said, however, Rachel couldn’t remember.
During the day she had lain down for a nap and tried to summon back the airy summer-house and the plump child, so that she could finish the important matter she had been talking about. But the little girl didn’t reappear, and there was no point expecting her to, since Rachel never dreamed during the day.
Now she waddled to the gates, a simple-faced Jewish woman with round eyes ringed by years of insomnia, and she saw a girl standing outside with a checked cloth suitcase. She let her in.
“Good evening, may I speak to Mickey?” the girl asked.
“Mickey?” Rachel was surprised. “He doesn’t live here, he lives in Manhattan. He left for California yesterday anyway.”
Valentina put her case on the ground. “How strange, he said he would meet me.”
“Ah, that’s Mickey!” Rachel waved an arm. “Where are you from?”
“From Moscow.”
As Valentina stood against the white gates, Rachel suddenly realized that the summer-house in her dream must be these gates, and that the plump child was this plump girl. “My God, my parents were from Warsaw!” she exclaimed happily, as though Warsaw and Moscow were adjacent streets. “Come on in!”
A few minutes later Valentina was sitting at a low table in the living-room, looking out at a sloping garden whose trees bent their heads in the gathering darkness towards the brightly lit window. On the table stood two delicate unglazed cups as thin as paper, and a rough terracotta teapot; there were biscuits that resembled seaweed, and pink triangular nuts with a fine shell. Rachel put her hands on her stomach in the same peasant pose as Valentina’s mother, tilted her head in its green silk turban to one side, and looked at her with kindly interest. It turned out that the Russian woman knew Polish, so they talked in Polish together, which gave Rachel great satisfaction.
“You’ve come here on holiday or to work?” she finally put the all-important question.
“I’ve come for good. Mickey promised to meet me and help me find work,” Valentina sighed.
“You met him in Moscow?” Rachel asked, tipping her head to the other shoulder: she had this funny habit of tilting her head from side to side.
Valentina thought hard for a moment; she was so tired that having a worldly conversation in Polish, let alone embellishing it a little, suddenly seemed beyond her strength. “The truth is, we got married.”
The blood rushed to Rachel’s face. Jumping up, she ran out of the room. “David, David! Come quick!” her voice rang through the house.
David, her husband, tall and thin like Mickey, stood at the top of the stairs in a red shirt and black skullcap, holding a thick fountain-pen in his hand, peering at her with a questioning look but saying nothing.
They were a fine pair, Mickey’s parents. Each discovered in the other what they lacked in themselves, and they rejoiced at the discovery. Several years ago, having reached the limits of human closeness, they were approaching their sixties and looking forward to a long and happy old age, when they learned to their horror that their only son had turned away from the laws of his sex and had deviated into such heathen wickedness that Rachel couldn’t even find a name for it.
“We were happy, too happy,” she muttered through the sleepless nights in the huge marriage bed in which they hadn’t touched each other since their terrible discovery. “Lord, make him a normal person again!”
The popular psychology books explained to her in clear and simple words that there was nothing unusual about her son, everything was fine, and a humane society must grant him his sacred and inalienable right to his own predilections. But this was no comfort to Rachel’s old-fashioned soul. A Jewish girl, saved from the fire and gas by the nuns, who for almost three years du
ring the occupation had hidden her in their convent, she reached the point of turning to the mother of that God in whom she mustn’t believe, but did believe nonetheless, and praying to her in Polish: “Holy Mother, do this for him, make him …”
As her husband came down the stairs to her now and saw her happy face, he guessed the happiness that had befallen her.
But this happiness was fictitious: Valentina was sitting in the living-room struggling to keep her tired eyes open. This was how her life in America began.
Alik stirred slightly.
Valentina started up. “What is it, Alik?”
“Drink.”
She brought the cup to his lips. He sipped and coughed. She lifted him up and tapped his back; he was as light as the puppet Anka Kron had given him. “There now, let’s get your tube.”
He took more water into his mouth and coughed again. This had been happening a lot recently. Valentina moved him again and tapped his back. She gave him the tube, and again he coughed, longer this time, and couldn’t clear his throat. She wet a flannel and put it in his mouth. His lips were dry and slightly cracked.
“Shall I rub something on your lips?” she asked.
“On no account, I hate grease. Give me your finger instead.”
She put her finger between his dry lips and he moved his tongue over it. It was the only touch left to him now; it looked as though this would be the last night they made love. They both thought about it.
“I shall die an adulterer,” he said quietly.
Valentina’s life had been exceptionally difficult in those early years. She generally went straight from work to her classes. But one day she had had to go home early after her landlady called asking her to bring the keys because something was wrong with the front door, Valentina didn’t understand exactly what. She gave the landlady her key, but this didn’t work either. Leaving the landlady with the broken lock, she decided to get something to eat at Katz’s, the Jewish delicatessen on the corner, before she went on to her class. The prices at Katz’s were reasonable, and the corned beef and turkey sandwiches were superb. The burly staff, who looked as if they could handle concrete slabs, sliced the fragrant meat artistically with their large knives and chatted in their local dialect. The place was rather full, and there was a queue at the counter. The man standing in front of Valentina with his back to her spoke affably to the salesman: “Listen, Misha, ten years I’ve been coming here. You and Aron, you’re twice as fat and the sandwiches are half as thick. Why is that?”
The Funeral Party Page 6