The Funeral Party (6 page)

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 Alik 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.

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 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.