They delivered the casket at ten. Two undertakers, working with consummate skill, placed the casket on the table next to the deceased. Deftly, even artfully, they lifted the body up and dropped it gently into the casket, where it landed in just the right place with a hollow thud. Her father went out of the room with the undertakers, leaving Nora alone. He paid them their fees in the corridor, at the door, and Nora heard them thanking him. Her father had no doubt given them more than they expected.
The flaps of the garments she had cut through the back had shifted and come apart, and Nora tucked them in on either side of the body again. She combed her grandmother’s wispy gray hair and parted it the way she liked it, then gathered up the loose strands and pulled them to the back. She admired her grandmother’s slightly sloping forehead and elongated eyelids. Her grandmother’s silhouette was defined by several basic lines—the outline of her cheekbones, the transition from her neck to her shoulder, the line that ran from the knees to her toes. Nora even had the urge to pick up a pencil to sketch her. The deceased seemed to have grown more attractive overnight. Her face could not have been described as pretty; rather, it was beautiful, slender and luminous, and the excess aging skin that had hung down under her chin had melted away. She had become more youthful. Too bad Nora’s own face hadn’t turned out to resemble her grandmother’s.
“Nora, the neighbors are saying that we should organize a meal … There should be a funeral repast.” Her father looked at her expectantly.
Nora thought for a moment. Grandmother had objected to having neighbors barge into her room her whole life. It didn’t make any difference now, though.
“Tell Katya to set the table, and give her some money for shopping. Have her set it up in the kitchen. But don’t let her buy a lot of vodka, or she’ll drink too much. We can’t not have a repast, of course…”
Her father agreed. “Before the war, there weren’t as many tables in the kitchen. We always set the table there. There were a lot of old men here back then. They’re all dead now, of course. But I never went to the wakes, and Mama didn’t go, either. Strange as it may seem, my father was the one who attended them.”
This was one of the first times Genrikh had ever mentioned his father. Nora noted this with surprise. In fact, no one had ever told her anything about Jacob Ossetsky. He was just a hazy recollection from childhood. She did remember him, though: he had been at their house on Nikitsky Boulevard once. A few traces remained in her memory—a bushy mustache, long, large ears, and a self-fashioned crutch made from a single piece of wood, with a crook in the branch that served as a handgrip. She never saw him again after that.
Her father went to find the recently banished Katya. She was glad to be charged with the task, and glad about the money, and said that she would go to the store and buy everything. Nora’s father nodded in assent. It was all the same to him, but to Katya it was an exciting prospect. Nora and Katya left at almost the same time, one to the florist’s on the Arbat, the other in the direction of Revolution Square. Katya was happy. She had money, an amount that was one and a half times her monthly wages, and she was estimating how to cut down on the cost of the necessary purchases so there would be something left over.
In the florist’s on the Arbat, Nora came across something that filled her with wonder: enormous hyacinths, a whole bucketful of them, which she was seeing for the first time. She bought all of them—the lilac-blue ones, and the white, and the rosy pink. She spent all the cash she had. They wrapped the flowers in multiple layers of newsprint, and even threw in the bucket for good measure.
Lugging the garden bucket, she walked along a short stretch of Trubnikovsky Lane. Then she crossed Novy Arbat, and again found herself on Trubnikovsky, now on the longer section of it. It was drizzling—rain or snow, she couldn’t distinguish. The light was pearly gray; the bucket was heavy. Her boots were completely soaked through, and her milk had already started up. But she had stuffed folded diapers into her bra, and on top of this layer of rigging she had bound an old kerchief. Early in the morning, Taisia had kicked up a fuss, demanding that Nora bind up her breasts and threatening that if she refused, Taisia would put her foot down and forbid her to go to the funeral. Nora had laughed and complied.
She arrived back at her grandmother’s apartment at the same time as the hearse. She went upstairs first, ahead of the undertakers. A few downcast figures, distant relatives, were standing around. One or two vaguely familiar people came up to Nora and her father and kissed them, uttering stock phrases, with varying degrees of warmth. One tiny elderly woman in a white scarf and beret wept silently; someone in the corner offered her a few drops of valerian in Grandmother’s “medicine glass,” to soothe her. Nora didn’t recognize the woman.
Nora threw the flowers into the casket. There was no need to arrange them in any special way—the flowers had their own magic, which transformed everything around them. The paucity of the surroundings acquired splendor, like Cinderella. It nearly took Nora’s breath away—Nora, a professional with years of experience in theater set design, whose mastery consisted in transforming the stage through artifice. It was like the magic lantern that had been used long ago in The Blue Bird at the Moscow Art Theatre, in the scene when Tyltyl and Mytyl arrive in the land of the dead to find their grandmother and grandfather. Of course, it had been Marusya who took her, when she was five years old, to see this play. It seemed to Nora that she could discern, in the thin strip between Marusya’s imperfectly closed eyelids, sympathy and approval. The hyacinths possessed some sort of uncanny power. They filled the room with their pungent scent, overwhelming the smell of her grandmother’s eau de cologne, and the dust, and the valerian. Nora even felt that, with just one touch of a magic wand, this room would become a palace, and her poor grandmother, with her large ambitions, would become what she had always wanted, but was unable, to be …
Then all four of the undertakers picked up the casket and carried it down to the street. The hearse (which resembled an ordinary small bus; it accommodated the coffin and about ten of the mourners), took off, and her father followed behind it in his Moskvich.
It was only a short distance to the Donskoy crematorium. They arrived earlier than necessary, and milled around for a half hour, waiting their turn. Then the casket was loaded onto something resembling a baggage trolley, and Nora and Genrikh were allowed to proceed ahead of the others. Nora was again in charge of the flowers. It seemed to her that since the time she had bought them the flowers had opened further, and were now fully bloomed. This time she chose not to cast them chaotically into the casket, but to lay them down deliberately, with foresight: the rose-pink blooms closer to the yellowed face, the lilac ones in an unbroken line around her head and along her arms. And all those inappropriate carnations that the mourners were now bringing in—Nora decided to toss these at her feet.
Then the mourners entered, all of them dressed in heavy black coats with red carnations, and surrounded the coffin in a horseshoe formation of relatives and friends. Everything looked a bit shimmery, but she could see with perfect clarity. In the midst of this clarity of vision, she realized that all the relatives fell into two different breeds: her father’s cousins, who reminded her of hedgehogs, with their coarse hair growing low on the forehead, long noses with a snout on the end, and shortish chins; and her grandmother’s nieces and nephews, who had slender, elongated faces, large eyes, and triangular fish-mouths …
And I’m from the hedgehog breed, Nora thought, feeling hot and queasy all of a sudden. At that moment, Chopin’s “Marche funèbre” began to play, disrupting her strange vision. The march had long ago become an aural impropriety, fit only for comic scenes.