The Funeral Party Read Free

got up to a few things, I admit it, I’ve sinned. But he was my only husband and now he’s waiting for me there. Do you see what I’m getting at? If you want to be with him when you get there he has to be baptized, unconscious if need be.”
    “What d’you mean, unconscious?” Nina was taken aback.
    “We must get away from everyone,” Maria Ignatevna hissed. And although the others were gathered around Alik at that moment and the kitchen was empty, she pushed Nina into the lavatory. Here she sat on the pink seat-cover of the toilet, while Nina perched on the plastic laundry-box and listened to her instructions in this most inappropriate of settings.
    Soon Faika arrived, strong as a nutcracker, with a woody face and pale wiry hair that stuck up like pieces of straw. She wasone of the most recent arrivals in America, but she had acclimatized quickly.
    “Hey, I’ve bought a new camera!” she announced from the door. Going over to Alik she waved the box above his motionless head. “It’s a Polaroid with a reversible film! You’re going to have your picture taken!”
    There were many things in this country which Faika had yet to try, and she was in a hurry to buy everything, taste everything, check everything out and form opinions.
    Valentina fanned Alik with the sheet, making a breeze over him, but he was the only one of them who wasn’t too hot. Throwing the sheet aside, she slipped behind him and sat with her back against the headboard, pulling him up so that his dark auburn head rested on her solar plexus, where according to her late grandmother the “little soul” had its home. All of a sudden, tears of pity welled up for his poor head, lolling helplessly against her chest like a baby who hasn’t yet learnt to hold it up. Never in their long affair had she felt such a keen, searing desire to hold him in her arms, to carry him, or better still to hide him in the depths of her body and protect him from this damnable death which had already so manifestly touched his arms and legs.
    “Gather around girls, the cock has crowed!” she cried with a smile on her lips, hanging her celebrated breasts in their red packaging over Alik, and wiping the sweat from her forehead and the tears from her cheeks.
    Gioia sat on one side of the bed, bending Alik’s leg at the knee and holding it up with her shoulder. On the other side, for photographic symmetry, sat Teeshirt.
    Faika turned the camera over, looking for the viewfinder. She finally squinted through it. “Oy Alik, your balls are in the way, cover them up!” she ordered.
    The tubes of his urine-bag were in the foreground.
    “Cover up such loveliness? What an idea!” Valentina snorted.
    Alik twitched a corner of his mouth. “Precious little use for it now,” he said.
    “Wait, Faika,” Valentina said. Pushing two large Russian cushions from Nina’s trousseau behind his back, she moved down the bed and started gently peeling the pink plaster from the tender spot to which the catheter had been attached.
    “Let him rest a bit and run free,” she said.
    Alik smiled; he liked jokes, even second-rate ones. Valentina worked quickly, with a practised hand; there are women, born nurses, whose hands know everything in advance and don’t need to be taught.
    Unable to bear any more, Maika jumped up and left the room. Last year she had had sex, first with Geoffrey Leshinsky then with Tom Caine, and she had come to the conclusion that she didn’t need it for anything in the world. But for some reason she felt shaken by Valentina’s ritual with the catheter, and the way she fingered him, and why were they all over him like that?
    The shower happened to be free at that moment. As she stepped out of her shorts she felt the small rectangular box through the material. She wrapped everything up carefully, to make sure nothing fell out. She remembered every word of her instructions. She had spent last night beside Alik, not the whole night, just a few hours. Nina had gone off