The Funeral Party

by Ludmila Ulitskaya

  Now the damned Irishman will start ranting, Claude thought. But without saying a word the landlord pressed the button of the lift.

  THIRTEEN

  For two days and nights they didn’t switch off the television. For two days and nights the telephone didn’t stop ringing. The door banged incessantly. Alik lay flat and rubbery, like an empty hot-water bottle, but his mind was alert and he assured everyone he was feeling better.

  Like a classical drama, the plot had unfolded for three days. In that time the past, from which they had more or less totally cut themselves off, came back into their lives and they were horrified. They wept, searched for familiar faces in the crowds outside the White House, and were rewarded by the moment when Lyuda’s son suddenly yelled: “Look, there’s Dad!”

  On the screen a bearded man in glasses, who looked somehow familiar to everyone, was walking towards the camera with his head bowed.

  Lyuda clutched her throat with both hands: “It’s Kostya! I knew he’d be there!”

  By this time it was obvious that the coup hadn’t succeeded.

  “We’ve won,” Alik said.

  It was unclear who “we” was, but it was the same “we” Father Victor had discovered to his surprise in Paris at the start of the Second World War. His grandfather, a White officer who had become a priest after emigrating, began to feel this sharp connection with Russia then. All of a sudden, the “they,” for whom his feelings had been hardening during his years in exile, had become that same “we,” very nearly causing him to return home in 1947 to certain death.

  Libin disagreed with Alik but he wasn’t going to argue, and merely murmured, “Well it’s not clear who’s won, in fact.”

  Everyone was just happy that civil war had been averted, and that the tanks had left the city.

  The news bulletins continued uninterruptedly: on Lyubyanka Square they toppled the statue to Dzerzhinsky and showed the empty plinth. The finest monument to Soviet power was an empty pedestal; the party, which had immortalized itself in granite, marble and steel, had crumbled to dust and vanished like an hallucination.

  Three people were killed and buried, three grains of sand picked from the crowd by a heavenly hand, three young men with good faces, a Russian, a Ukrainian, a Jew. Over two of them they waved incense, the third was covered with a prayer shawl. There were thousands and thousands of people. There had never been such funerals in this country. It was as though everything sick, rotten and wicked was being thrown away like slops, a bucket of stinking rubbish floating down the river.

  The people sitting here now, former Russians, were unanimously happy, and they celebrated not by drinking more than usual but by singing old Soviet songs. Best of all sang Valentina:

  Around us all is blue and green

  Under the window the nightingales sing …

  There was nothing blue and green in this neighbourhood, this apartment, their lives here had other nuances, other degrees of intensity, yet each recalled the colours of their childhood: Valentina remembered Institute Street in Kaluga, running between two rows of pale lime trees to the soapy-blue Oka; Alik remembered the blues and greens of Moscow Province, the diffident, sweetly trusting colours of the spring foliage and the long tender shadows across the sky; Faika remembered her village, its lank back gardens, and the clumsy golden church domes against the bright-green hedge.

  Outside the window the Paraguayan music dragged on, not the salsa now but something wild and mindless, banging and howling. Alik was more sensitive to music than the others. “For Christ’s sake go and shut them up,” he begged Libin.

  Libin grabbed Natasha and left.

  On the television more crowds appeared. In the room there were also crowds of people, and it seemed to Alik that the two were connected. At times among the familiar faces an unfamiliar one would flash past. He glimpsed a small grey old man in strange white clothes, with a leather strap around his forehead, not quite in focus.

  “Nina, who’s that old fellow?” he asked.

  Nina started, wondering if he had noticed the landlord.

  “See, that little one with the white beard.”

  Nina looked, but the old man had disappeared.

  The unbearable music disappeared too, and in its place came children, a large number of strange, unfriendly children with animal faces. Despite the lateness of the evening, it was very hot.

  Valentina came to Alik. “What would you like?”

  “Sing me something cool.”

  She sat next to him, embraced his inert leg and sang quietly and very clearly:

  Frost, frost, do not freeze me

  Do not freeze my horse or me …

  Her voice was cool, and ripples from it spread through the air like a toy boat being lowered into the water. Alik saw himself bundled in his old thick brown fur coat tied by the belt with his favourite buckle. His head was covered by a tight beaver-lamb cap on top of a white kerchief, and he was sitting in his old sledge with the bent back. Walking in front of him he saw his mother’s felt boots, and the hem of her blue coat flapping against the grey of the felt. A woollen scarf was tied tightly over his mouth. The scarf was wet and warm, and he had to breathe hard, very hard, because the moment he stopped an icy crust would seal the moist, warm gap and the scarf would freeze and hurt him.

  There were more children now, and they were wearing fur coats too, fluffy and covered in snow.

  The door banged, and Libin tumbled out of the lift with the six Paraguayans. They were short, dressed in black trousers and white shirts, and banging castanets, rattles and drums.

  “Nina, who are these people?” Alik asked uncertainly.

  “Libin’s brought them.”

  Libin was very drunk. He came up to Alik. “Hey, look at these wonderful guys! I took them for a drink. I thought they wouldn’t be able to play if they had a glass in their hands, and I was right! They’re wonderful guys, but they don’t know any English. One of them can say a few words, the others don’t even speak much Spanish, their language is Guarani or something. We had a drink and I told them my friend was ill, and they said they had some special music for people who are ill. How about it? They’re wonderful guys.”

  The Paraguayans had already formed themselves into a line. Their leader, who had a scar across his brick-red face, struck his drum and they moved around in a circle, swaying rhythmically and emitting a strange half-gulp, half-yell, bending their short legs at every step.

  The women, who in recent weeks had been so exasperated by their noise, now collapsed into silent laughter. Yet here in the apartment it sounded quite different, eerily serious, reminiscent not of street music but of other, immeasurably greater things. In it was the beat of the heart, the breath of the lungs, the movement of water, the growl of the digestion. Heavens, even their instruments were skulls and bones, and skeletons hung from them like festive decorations. The music finally died away, but before people had time to murmur together in the pause, the men turned to face the other way, still in single file and made another circle, and another kind of music started up, ancient and macabre.

  The dance of death, Alik thought.

  Suddenly its meaning was revealed to him as the story of the dying body, and the musicians’ movements as part of the prologue to some theme which would follow. The monotonous and doleful sounds which had so irritated him for weeks past now appeared as familiar as the alphabet, but they broke off, leaving something unsaid.

  More and more guests arrived. He saw in the crowd his old school physics teacher, Nikolai Vasilevich, known as the Galosh, and he felt a weary surprise that the man had emigrated at his age. How old would he be now? He saw his classmate Kolka Zaitsev, who had been killed falling under a tram, a thin boy in a ski-jacket with pockets, kicking a soft rag ball in front of him; how sweet that he had brought it along. He saw his cousin Musya, who had died of leukaemia as a child, walking across the room with a washing-up bowl in her hands, only she wasn’t a child now but almost grown up. None of this seemed at all
strange to him, but in the correct order of things; there was even a sense of old injustices being put right.

  Fima came and touched his cold hand. “Maybe you should come back now, Alik?”

  “Okay,” Alik agreed.

  Fima gathered up his light body and carried him to the bedroom. His lips were blue, and his fingernails were a paler blue, but his hair burned with its unchanging dark copper colour.

  “Hypoxia,” Fima noted automatically.

  Nina took one of the bottles from the window-sill. The chief Paraguayan, who was their interpreter, went over to Valentina and asked her if he could touch her hair. With one hand he felt his own rough locks, gleaming like coal, and with the other he ran his fingers through her tinted, many-coloured tresses, and he laughed with delight; two weeks ago they had left their village in the rainforest and had come to New York, and he hadn’t yet managed to touch all the wonders of this new world. Valentina had the strange sensation that someone was putting a skullcap on her head, but there was nothing unpleasant about it and it soon passed.

  Alik was fighting for air. He knew that he must breathe as deeply as possible, otherwise the warm gap in his scarf would close. He breathed in convulsively, rather more often than he breathed out.

  “I’m tired,” he said.

  Fima held his wrist, dry as the branch of a dead tree. The diaphragm muscle was dying now, the lungs were dying, the heart. Fima opened his medical bag and pondered. He could give Alik a camphor injection, drive on his exhausted heart and make it gallop for a while. Or morphine maybe, a blissful oblivion from which he wouldn’t return. Or things could just take their course. In that case he wouldn’t live more than a day, two at most. There was no knowing how many hours he might last.

  This country hated suffering; it rejected it ontologically, admitting it only as an incident which must be instantly eradicated. This young, suffering denying nation had developed whole schools—philosophical, psychological and medical—dedicated to the single problem of how to save people from suffering. Fima’s Russian brain had difficulty in coping with this concept. The land which had raised him loved and valued suffering, and derived its nourishment from it: from suffering people grew, developed, became wise. Fima’s Jewish blood, filtered for millennia through suffering, carried within it an extra vital substance which disintegrated in its absence; people like him lost touch with the earth under their feet when released from suffering.

  But none of this applied now to Alik; Fima didn’t want his friend to suffer so cruelly during the last hours of his life.

  “We’d better call the ambulance, Nina,” he said, more resolutely than he felt.

  FOURTEEN

  The ambulance arrived fifteen minutes later, and a skinny intellectual in glasses appeared with a robust young black man built like a basketball player, with a jutting jaw. He was the doctor; the other man was probably a runaway Pole or Czech, Fima decided, who also hadn’t managed to pass his American exams. He found the similarities unwelcome and unpleasant, and he walked to the window.

  The doctor threw the sheet off Alik and passed his hands in front of his eyes. Alik didn’t respond. The doctor took his wrist, which drowned in his large hand like a pencil, and the sentence he uttered was long and incomprehensible. Fima guessed that he was talking about respirators and hospitalization, but he couldn’t make out if he was suggesting they take Alik or was refusing to take him.

  Nina tossed her hair and declared in Russian that she wasn’t letting Alik go anywhere. The doctor peered at her exhausted beauty, then, lowering his remarkable lashes over his eyes, said, “I understand, Ma’am.”

  Drawing three ampoules of liquid into a large syringe, he injected Alik between the skin and bone of his almost nonexistent thigh.

  The man in glasses stopped writing, knitted his shaggy, long-suffering brows on his beaky face and said to the doctor in an accent which seemed even to Fima to be atrocious: “The lady’s in a bad way, we’d better give her a sedative or something, seeing as …”

  The doctor pulled off his gloves, threw them in his case without looking at his assistant, and muttered a contemptuous remark. It tore Fima apart; he would have liked to do something to him. “Why am I sitting here like a prick? I’m not staying, I’m going back,” he thought for the first time in all these wretched years, and suddenly he felt afraid. Could he ever go back to being a real doctor? Would he be able to pass all those damned exams in Russian? Who would need them in Kharkov anyway, with his diploma?

  As soon as the useless medical team had left, Nina became very agitated. Dashing to her bottles again, she sat at the bottom of Alik’s bed and poured oil into her palms, rubbing his feet, from the tips of his toes up his legs to his thighs.

  She poured handful after handful from the bottle. “They understand nothing, Alik, nothing. No one understands anything, they don’t believe in anything. But I believe. Lord, I believe.” Splashes of oil flew around, spreading on the sheet as she rubbed his legs, his chest. “Alik, Alik, do something, say something. Damn the night, you’ll be better tomorrow, you’ll see.”

  Alik said nothing, just took a few laboured, shuddering breaths.

  “You lie down for a bit, Nina, and I’ll massage him, okay?” Fima said, and she agreed surprisingly easily. “Gioia’s keeping watch in the studio. She wanted to be on duty tonight. Maybe you could sleep on the carpet for a while and she could sit here?”

  “Gioia can clear off, he doesn’t need anyone.” Nina lay down with her face by Alik’s feet, stretching across the wide bed in which he was already completely lost, and speaking to him: “We’ll go to Jamaica, we’ll visit Florida, we’ll hire a big car and take everyone with us, Valentina, Libin, everyone. We’ll visit Disneyland too, right, Alik? We’ll have a wonderful time. We’ll stay in motels, just like we used to. They don’t understand a thing, these doctors. We’ll cure you with herbs, the herbs will get you on your feet, they’ve raised worse than you!”

  “Try to sleep a little now, Nina,” Fima urged.

  She nodded: “Bring me a drink.”

  Fima went to fix her drink. The guests had departed.

  In a corner of the studio Gioia nursed her little grey Dostoyevsky, waiting to be called. One of the remaining guests slept on, his head covered in a blanket. Lyuda finished washing the glasses and looked at Fima. “It’s the final agony,” he told her.

  He brought Nina her drink. She drank it, curled up at Alik’s feet again, muttered something inaudible, and fell asleep. It seemed she still didn’t understand what was happening.

  Tomorrow, or rather today, was a working day for Fima. The day after he could take off, the day after that he probably wouldn’t be needed any more. He sat on the bed and spread wide his bumpy knees with their shaggy carpet of hair, a clumsy, tedious man, a failure. There was nothing he could do now but sit here sadly sipping vodka and orange, wetting Alik’s lips—Alik was unable to swallow now—and wait for the inevitable.

  Close to morning Alik’s fingers started shaking slightly, and Fima decided the time had come to wake Nina. He stroked her head and she returned slowly from somewhere far away: as always it took her a long time to understand where she had been brought back to. “Nina, wake up!” he said as her eyes finally came to life.

  She leaned over her husband and was astonished yet again by the changes that had taken place in him during the short time she had been asleep. His face was now that of a fourteen-year-old boy, childish, bright and calm. But his breathing was almost inaudible.

  “Alik.” She stroked his head, his neck. “Oh, Alik.”

  There had always been something supernatural about his responsiveness. He would answer her call instantly and from any distance. He would telephone her from another town at the very moment when she was longing for him and needed him most. Now, for the first time, her voice failed to reach him.

  “What’s wrong, Fima? What’s happening?”

  Fima clasped her thin shoulders. “He’s dying, Nina.”

  And s
he knew it was true.

  Her transparent eyes lit up. Pulling herself together, she said to Fima with unexpected firmness: “Go out and don’t come back in here for a while.”

  Fima went out without saying a word.

  FIFTEEN

  Lyuda stood irresolutely at the door, looking in.

  “Go away all of you, all of you!” Nina’s gesture was majestic, even theatrical.

  Gioia sat in the corner resting her chin on her knee, and said in surprise: “But Nina, I was going to sit with him.”

  “Everybody out, I said!”

  Gioia flushed, shook herself and ran to the lift. Lyuda stood distractedly in the middle of the studio. The sleeping guest snored on with the blanket over his head.

  Nina ran to the kitchen and groped in the back of the cupboard for a white porcelain soup tureen.

  For a moment she recalled the marvellous day in Washington when they had bought it. They had been staying with their friend Slavka Crane, a cheerful double-bass player who had retrained as a sad computer programmer. They had eaten breakfast in a small restaurant near a little square in the Alexandria district. Some pensioners were playing astoundingly bad but free music on the street, and afterwards Slavka had taken them off to an open-air market. It was such a happy day that they decided to buy something beautiful, but for a few cents (as always, they were very short of money), and a handsome grey-haired black man with a withered arm had sold them this English soup tureen dating from the time of the Boston tea party. They had spent the rest of the day dragging around with them this large, inconvenient object which they couldn’t fit in their bag, and Slavka had gone in his car to meet someone or see them off.

  “This is why we bought it,” Nina thought now, filling it with water.

  Drawing herself up to her full height, she solemnly carried it into the bedroom, holding it to her face and pressing her lips against its sides.