The Funeral Party Read Free Page B

him. Irina liked him; she twitched her shoulders, lowered her eyelids, and when she spoke to him her voice was a little lower than usual.
    “Why are you flirting like that?” Alik whispered. “It’s cheap. If you like him, go ahead.”
    She really did like him.
    “I didn’t really, not in that way,” she told Alik later. “Only a bit anyway.”
    But at the time, angry at the cruel truth of his words, she had jumped out of the window, slid on her bottom to the edge of the roof and stood up to her full height beside the bottles. Then squatting down on her heels—only Alik could see what she was doing—she grasped the necks of the first two bottles and kicked up her legs. The sharp toes of her shoes froze against the spreading lilac of the sky. Those facing the window saw her hand-stand and fell silent.
    The writer, who could see nothing, chuckled at himself as he recounted a story about a general who had his overcoat stolen. Alik took a step closer to the window. Irina was already walking on her hands over the bottles now. She grasped the necks with both hands, tore one hand away, felt for the next bottle and grasped that one, transferring the weight of her tensed body on to it. The writer’s bass voice rumbled on. Then, realizing that something was going on behind his back,he stopped and looked around. His fleshy cheeks trembled; he couldn’t abide heights. The building was no more than one-and-a-half storeys—five metres high—but physiology is more powerful than arithmetic.
    Alik’s hands were wet. The sweat dripped down his back. Nelka Kazantseva, their landlady and another wild woman, clattered down the wooden stairs and dashed out on to the street.
    Slowly, the points of her shoes scratching the petrified sky, Irina reached the last bottle, tucked her legs under her, landed gracefully on her toes and slid down a rickety drainpipe.
    Nelka was already standing outside. “Run! Run as fast as you can!” she yelled.
    She had seen the expression on Alik’s face, and her reaction was swift.
    Irina rushed towards Kropotkin Subway Station, but it was too late. Alik caught up with her, grabbed her by the hair and slapped her face.
    They stayed together for two more years after that because they didn’t know how to finish it, but the best part had ended with that slap. Eventually they parted, unable to forgive or to stop loving each other. Their pride was diabolical: she had gone off with her writer that night and Alik hadn’t turned a hair.
    It was Irina who finally made the break. She was taken on by a troupe of trapeze artists, a rival company, which made her grandfather curse her, and she spent the whole of that summer on tour with the big top. Alik then made his first attempt to emigrate: he moved to Petersburg.
    He opened his eyes. He could still feel the heat comingoff the hot roof of the Kazantsevs’ shabby house in Afanasevsky Street, and his muscles seemed to twitch in response to his headlong flight down the wooden stairs. In his dream the memories seemed richer than in his memory itself, for he could make out details which had long been obliterated: their landlord’s cracked cup with the portrait of Karl Marx on it; the single aristocratic pure-white lock of hair on the dark head of the Kazantsevs’ ten-year-old son; the ring with the dead-green turquoise in the dark-blue enamel setting on Irina’s finger, which she had lost soon afterwards …
    The sun was already setting over New Jersey, and the light slanted through the window on to Alik. He screwed up his eyes. Gioia was sitting on the bed beside him reading
The Divine Comedy.
She read in Italian at his request, inelegantly repeating each
terza
in English. Alik didn’t tell her that he knew Italian rather well: he had lived in Rome for almost a year, and that happy, glass-clinking language had imprinted itself effortlessly on his mind like a handprint in clay. But none of his gifts had any meaning now: he would be taking with him his