The Funeral Party Read Free Page A

to sleep in the studio, but Alik hadn’t slept; he had called for her, she had agreed to do everything he had asked, and now, that little box was proof that she really was the one who was closest to him.
    The heat had warmed the water in the pipes, and all the towels were wet. Drying herself as best she could, she slitheredinto her clothes and slipped out of the apartment: she didn’t want to be photographed with him, she knew that.
    Going down to the Hudson River, she made for the ferry pier and thought about the one normal adult who as though to spite her was now about to die, leaving her alone again with the innumerable idiots—Russians, Jews, Americans—who had surrounded her since the day she was born.

THREE
    Something had happened to Alik’s vision. Things disappeared and sharpened simultaneously. Densities altered and expanded. The faces of his friends became liquid, and objects flowing. But this flowing was pleasant rather than unpleasant, and revealed the connections between them in a new way. The corner of the room was cut off by an old ski, from which the dingy white walls ran off cheerfully in all directions. These undulations were halted by a female figure sitting cross-legged on the floor, touching the wall with the back of her head. This point, where her head touched the wall, was the most stable part of the picture.
    Someone had raised the blinds and the light fell on the dark liquids in the bottles, shining green and gold on the window-sill. The liquids stood at different levels, and this xylophone of bottles suddenly recalled a youthful dream. In those years he had painted many still lifes with bottles. Thousandsof bottles. Maybe more than he had drunk. No, he had drunk more. He smiled and closed his eyes.
    But the bottles didn’t go away: they stood there palely, like waving columns on the other side of his eyelids. He realized that this was important. The realization crept in slowly and hugely, like a loose cloud. Bottles, bottle rhythms. Music sounded. Scriabin’s light-music. This had turned out on closer study to be thin, mechanical rubbish. He had gone on to learn about optics and acoustics, but these hadn’t been the key to anything either. His still lifes weren’t bad, just utterly irrelevant: he hadn’t discovered the metaphysical still lifes of Morandi yet.
    All those paintings had been blown away in the wind; none were left now apart from a few in Petersburg maybe, stored by his friends there, or by the Kazantsevs in Moscow. God, how they used to drink in those days. They had collected the bottles, taking back the ordinary empties, but the foreign ones and the old ones of coloured glass they kept.
    The bottles standing on the tin flap which edged the roof of the Kazantsevs’ house in Moscow were Czech beer-bottles of dark glass. No one could remember who had put them up there. In the Kazantsevs’ kitchen was a low door leading up to the attic, and from the attic a window opened on to the roof. Irina once darted out of this window and ran across the roof. There was nothing unusual about this, they were forever running on to the roof to dance and sunbathe. This time she darted out and slid on her bottom down the pitch, and when she stood up two dark stains were clearly visible on the buttocks of her white jeans. She stood poised on the edge of the roof, his miraculous, light girl. God had sent them each other for their first love, and they were true and honest until the heavens rang.
    Irina’s strict grandfather, who was from an old circus family, had banished her from the troupe after she ran off with Alik to Petersburg for a couple of days and missed a rehearsal. They had moved into the Kazantsevs’ attic together and lived there for the next three months, weak from the weight of their still growing feelings for each other.
    On the day Irina ran across the roof they had had a visitor, a well-known writer of teenage fiction, a solid, grown-up man who brought two bottles of vodka with