The Funeral Party (10 page)

“What did I tell you? That’s Booby the flute player. Every evening he plays with God. I’ve just been here buying tickets for his concert. My wife won’t come with me, she doesn’t like this kind of music. Would you come with me?”

“I can only manage Sundays,” Valentina replied. “Every other day I’m busy from eight in the morning until eleven at night.”

“I see, hard to get,” Alik grinned.

“Well, that’s how it is—I’m at work by nine, I finish at six, at seven I have classes, then next day I babysit my landlady’s granddaughter. At eleven I’m free, at twelve I go to sleep. Three hours later I wake up, and that’s it. I have this American insomnia, God knows what it is. At three in the morning I’m like one of those dolls that never falls over. I’ve tried going to bed later but it makes no difference, after three I can’t get back to sleep.”

“Well, there are no concerts at that time, but there are plenty of places where things go on till morning. It doesn’t matter when we go, three’s okay.”

Nina was a serious alcoholic by then and her needs were
very simple. During the day she drank half a bottle of Russian vodka diluted with American juice, by one in the morning she was sleeping the sleep of the just. Alik would carry her from the armchair to the bedroom and would sleep beside her for a few hours. He was one of those people who don’t need much sleep, like Napoleon.

Alik’s affair with Valentina was conducted between the hours of three and eight. It didn’t start at once but gradually. Two months passed before he finally entered the basement room which Rachel had found for her in the house of one of her friends.

For the first two months he would visit twice a week at three in the morning. Stooping, he would whistle down to her dimly lit window. Ten minutes later she would hop out, pink and healthy in her black Gutsul shirt, and they would go to one of those night places which were rarely frequented by emigrés.

During one of the coldest nights of January, when the snow had lain on the ground for almost the whole week, they ended up at the fish market. Two steps from Wall Street teemed the most incredible life. Ships docked at the harbour from all over the world, and fishermen would hump their live, or, on this occasion, frozen wares on their backs, on carts and in baskets. The wide doors in the walls of the warehouses burst open to receive these marine riches. Two solidly built men bore on their shoulders a miraculous log of silver tuna, covered in a thin film of ice. On the stalls were arranged ordinary, unexceptional little mongrel fish, but the eye was drawn to the profusion of amazing sea monsters, with terrible eyes, claws and suckers. There were fish which seemed to consist entirely of mouths, and a large number of fantastic-looking shellfish, with their thin slivers of meat inside. There were snake-like animals
with sweet faces that reminded one of mermaids; there were intermediate life-forms, part animal, part plant; and there was unambiguous seaweed, layered and trailing like vines. In the white light of the lamps the colours merged in a swirl of blue, red, green and pink. Some creatures still stirred, some had already stiffened.

In the alleyways stood several iron braziers with flames licking from them, and from time to time freezing people would hurry over to warm themselves there. The people here were as marvellous as their wares: Norwegians with auburn beards streaked by hoar-frost, whiskered Chinese, island people with ancient, exotic faces. Pushing through them were wholesalers from all over New York and New Jersey drawn by the low prices, as well as cooks and owners of the best restaurants, drawn by the fresh goods.

“It’s like a fairy-story!” Valentina laughed, and Alik was happy to have found someone who was as crazy about it as he was.

“What did I tell you?” He pulled her into a café to drink whiskey, because it was essential to drink in this freezing weather. The owner greeted him, of course.

“He’s my friend. Look over here,” he jabbed a finger at the wall, where beside the prints of yachts and ships and the photos of people Valentina didn’t know hung a small painting depicting two insignificant fish: a reddish one with a spiky, wide-open fin, a greyish one like a herring. “For that picture Robert said I could drink on the house for the rest of my life.”

Sure enough, the bald, red-faced patron was already handing them two whiskies.

There was a large crowd of sailors, loaders and traders here. It was a man’s place, with no women present. The men drank and ate the café’s fish soup, but the food wasn’t the
point. They came not to eat but to drink, rest and get warm. The cold was exceptional for New Yorkers; they didn’t seem to understand, the way true northerners do, that you don’t keep warm by putting on a fur coat over a thin shirt, stuffing two pairs of nylon socks inside rubber boots and sticking a baseball cap on your head.

“Drink up quick, or we’ll miss the best bit,” Alik hurried Valentina up.

They went out to the street again. During the half-hour they had been inside, everything had changed at cartoon speed. The stalls had been cleared away, the doors of the warehouses had closed and turned back into solid walls, the braziers with the cheerful flames had gone, and a posse of tall lads walked down from the direction of the harbour hosing the scraps of fish off the ground. Fifteen minutes later Alik and Valentina stood almost alone on this promontory on the southernmost tip of Manhattan, and the whole night spectacle seemed like a dream.

“Okay, let’s go and drink some more,” Alik said. He took her to a diner empty of people. The tables sparkled with cleanliness. A young boy, the owner’s son, had just finished mopping the floor. He too nodded at Alik.

“This isn’t all either. In exactly fifteen minutes we’ll see the final act.”

In exactly fifteen minutes the nearby subway spewed out a crowd of elegantly dressed men and coiffed women, wearing good shoes, smart suits and this season’s perfumes.

“Mother of God, where are they off to, a party?” Valentina gasped.

“They’re clerks and secretaries mostly, they work in Wall Street. A lot of them live in Hoboken, another fascinating
place I’ll show you one day. They’re not that rich, they make about sixty to a hundred thousand a year. White-collar workers, the most slavish breed.”

They walked to the station, because it was time for Valentina to go to work. She looked around, but where the fish market had been there was just a faint smell of fish, which you had to sniff hard to catch.

As well as the fish market were the meat and flower markets. In the flower market you could get lost among the tubs with trees; it opened at night and went on throughout the day. Outside the meat market they once met a red-haired man with a familiar face. Alik exchanged a couple of words with him, then they walked on.

“Who was that?”

“Didn’t you recognize him? That was Brodsky, he lives near here.”

“The living Brodsky?” Valentina asked in surprise.

It truly was the living Brodsky.

They also visited a dance club, with a unique clientele of rich elderly ladies and decrepit gentlemen, mothballed lovers of the tango, the foxtrot and the Boston waltz.

Sometimes they just walked. Then one night they kissed, and after that they almost stopped walking. Alik would whistle from the street, and Valentina would open the door.

For a while Valentina moved into Mickey’s apartment after he left to teach for several years at a well-known film school in California. His personal life changed for the better, although Rachel still grieved that instead of sweet, plump Valentina whose large breasts could have fed as many grandchildren as you could wish for, Mickey’s lover was a little Spanish professor who specialized in the works of García Lorca.

Mickey’s apartment was downtown, and Alik would visit Valentina there, still between the sacred hours of three and eight.

There was a time when she refused his visits. She had moved to Queens, where she had been hired by the college there to teach Russian. In Queens she had another man, also from Russia; no one had seen him, they only knew that he worked as a truck-driver. It was unclear how long the truck-driver lasted in Valentina’s life, but when after stiff competition she got a proper American job teaching in one of the New York universities, he was no longer on the scene and Alik was back again. This time she knew it was for ever, and that no one would leave anyone, neither Valentina Alik, nor Alik Nina.

Lyuda, an engineer from Moscow, had been brought to the apartment the day before, had spent the night on the carpet and stayed. In the morning, the quietest time of the day, when those with jobs had left, those on benefits hadn’t opened their eyes, and Nina hadn’t shaken off her orange-juice dream, this unprepossessing, unmemorable woman washed yesterday’s cups and glasses then looked in on Alik. He was already awake.

“I’m Lyuda, from Moscow,” she repeated to be on the safe side; she had been introduced to him yesterday, but she was used to people not remembering her name.

“A long time?” Alik was instantly awake.

“Six days. It seems like a long time. Shall I wash you?” She asked this lightly as though her main activity were to wash the sick every morning. She took a wet towel and wiped his face, neck and hands.

“So what’s new in Moscow?” Alik asked mechanically.

“Nothing changes. Twaddle on the radio, the shops are empty, what’s new. You want breakfast?”

“Well, let’s try.”

Eating was difficult for him. For the last two weeks he had eaten only baby food, and he had trouble getting even this fruity mush down him.

“I’ll make you some potato puree.” Lyuda was already in the kitchen, rattling plates and saucepans.

The puree was thin and slipped down easily. Alik felt better this morning: the light wasn’t so blurred, and his vision was clearer and didn’t play tricks on him.

Lyuda plumped up his pillows, and thought sadly that it seemed to be her fate to bury everyone. In forty-five years she had buried her mother, her father, two grandmothers, her grandfather, her first husband, and only recently a close girlfriend. She fed them and washed them all, then she washed their bodies. This one wasn’t even hers, someone had brought her to him.

She had a mass of things to do, a long list of items to buy and strangers to visit, people who wanted to question her about their Moscow relatives and tell her about their lives, but she already felt part of this ridiculous household; it was as if she couldn’t tear herself away from this man she was beginning to love, and her heart would break again in exactly the same place.

The telephone rang. She picked it up, and someone shouted down the line: “Turn on CNN! There’s a coup in Moscow!”

“There’s a coup in Moscow,” Lyuda said in a faltering voice. “That’s something new for you.”

Scattered fragments of a news bulletin flashed across the television screen. Some kind of civil emergency, ugly thuggish
faces, thick-voiced, with corruption written all over them, like ill-fitting false teeth.

“Where do they find these ugly mugs?” Alik wondered aloud.

“And the ones here are any better?” Lyuda burst out with unexpected patriotism.

“Yes they are,” Alik thought a little. “Of course they’re better. They’re all crooks here too of course, but at least they’re ashamed. Those ones have no shame.”

It was impossible to make sense of what was happening. Gorbachev apparently had a health problem.

“They’ve probably killed him by now,” Alik said.

The telephone rang incessantly. An event like this was impossible to keep to oneself.

Lyuda moved the television to make it easier for Alik to see.

Her ticket was for 6 September. She must change it immediately and go back. Go back to what, though? Her son was here, her husband would do better to join them. But what could they do here, without the language, without anything? At home they had their books and their friends, a thousand dear people. Now all of them were swept up in this transient cloud on the screen.

“I said something would happen before that treaty was signed,” said Alik with satisfaction.

“What treaty?” said Lyuda, who didn’t follow politics because they repelled her.

“Wake Nina up,” Alik begged her.

But Nina was already creeping into the bedroom.

“Mark my words, everything is being decided now,” said Alik prophetically.

“What’s being decided?” Nina was flustered and still halfasleep;
all events outside the apartment were equally remote to her.

By evening a mass of people had gathered again. The television was carried from the bedroom and put on the floor of the studio, and everyone surged away from Alik and crowded around it. Something incomprehensible was happening: a twitching marionette popped up, a bathhouse superintendent, a moustached man with a face like a dog, half-devils, half-people, phantasmagoria from the dream sequence in
Evgeny Onegin,
and the tanks. Troops were entering Moscow. Huge tanks were sliding through the streets of the city, and it was unclear who was fighting whom.

Lyuda clutched her temples and groaned: “What’s happening? What will happen next?”

Her son, a young computer-programmer, had got off early from work and was sitting next to her a little embarrassed. “What will happen? There’ll be a military dictatorship of course.”