“There’s just one thing I beg you, no fucking tears, okay? Everything’s fine, just as it should be!”
Gioia sobbed loudly. Nina sat as though turned to stone, her eyes bulging. The women, ignoring Alik’s request, simultaneously burst into tears, and a few of the men allowed themselves to join in. Fima took from his pocket the checked rag he used as a handkerchief.
It was as if Alik could see them: “What’s wrong with you people? No tears, I said! Drink up! Mud in your eye! Nina, drink to me! Teeshirt, stop the tape a moment, darling!”
There was a pause. Maika didn’t press the button immediately, only after Alik’s voice rang out again: “Drink up! That’s better!”
She wound the tape back.
They drank standing up, without touching glasses, and the vast emptiness which comes after death receded a little and was filled by a sort of deception, but to their surprise it was filled nonetheless.
Irina leaned against the door-frame. She had already done all her weeping for Alik, yet something still tugged at her. What had been so special about him? Was it that he had loved everyone? But how had that love showed itself? Had he been a good artist? But surely if you didn’t sell, it meant you were no good? He had been an artist in his life perhaps; yes, he had lived as an artist. So why hadn’t she lived as an artist? Why had she pushed boulders uphill, overcome all obstacles and earned a pile of money? Because you weren’t with me my friend, she thought. Where were you?
“Have you drunk up?” Alik spoke again. “Please, everybody get well and truly smashed. Enough with the sad faces, why don’t you dance? Yes, I know what I wanted to say: Fima and Libin, if you don’t make up your stupid quarrel today you’ll be in the shit. There’s so few of us, so few.… Drink to me, both of you, and quit quarrelling!”
Libin and Fima, boyhood friends who had once played in the same yard together, looked at each other across the table and smiled at Alik’s belated curses. They had already made up during the hot months of summer. In the crowds and excitement of the past few days, with the tanks, the shooting, the coup in Moscow, remarks directed at no one in particular had landed in the right place, and the old resentments had melted away.
“They’re not touching glasses, they’re not touching glasses!” Faika twittered.
“Wait, they’ve got paper ones.” Valentina poured the wine into glasses and they knocked together clumsily, with a muffled ring.
“Here’s to you, old roughneck!” cried Fima.
“Here’s to the brassière!” Libin said, and both remembered the white brassière with large bone buttons and wire clasps sewn on with thick thread, which they had seen as boys in Kharkov after the war, in the life before last.
“My friends, I can’t thank you, because no such thanks exist,” Alik’s voice went on. “I worship you, all of you, especially the women. I’m even grateful for my damned illness. If it wasn’t for this I’d never have known how good you are. No, that’s a stupid thing to say, I’ve always known. I’d like to drink to you. To you Nina, bear up! To you, Teeshirt! To you, Valentina! Gioia, to you! Pirozhkova, I love you. Faika, thank you Pussy-cat, you took some wonderful photos. Lyuda, Natasha, all of you. Men, to you! There’s just one thing—I want this party to be happy. That’s all, fuckit.”
The tape turned, rustling slightly. There were no more words, just a few wheezing gasps. Nobody drank. Everyone stood silently holding their glasses, listening to the convulsive gulping for air and the Indian music bursting on to the tape from the street below.
Everyone strained their ears hoping to hear something else of importance, and it turned out that it wasn’t quite the end: the lift clanged, a door banged, then Alik said, “Okay Teesh, stop the tape,” in an everyday, tired voice without a trace of pathos. There was a click, then silence.
The merriment didn’t happen at once. For a while things were too quiet. Alik, as usual, had done something unusual. Three days ago he had been alive, then he had died; now he occupied some strange third position, and everyone was in a state of grief and shock about it, although they didn’t hold back on the alcohol.
People came and went from the table carrying plates and glasses, coming together in groups and moving away again. There had never been such a mixture of people. Alik’s musician friends came, along with several people whom no one had seen before; it wasn’t clear where he had picked them up or how they had learnt of his death. The Paraguayans stood in a solid phalanx, led by their leader with his dark-pink scar and craggy, handsome face. A Columbia University professor talked animatedly to the driver of the garbage-collection truck. Berman fancied Gioia, but pressures of work meant he hadn’t touched a woman for over two years and he wasn’t sure if he should let the genie out of the bottle now. If he had known what Alik knew he certainly wouldn’t have contemplated it, for not only was she a virgin, she was also the scion of a noble Roman family which was mentioned by Tacitus.
Nina asked someone to get a grey box down from the attic. Inside were priceless treasures, sent over long ago from Russia via diplomatic friends: this was the first jazz to make its way behind the iron curtain and back. Among the ancient heavy black pancakes were homemade ones, on x-ray plates, and a few brown spools with the first tape recordings.
Only Alik knew how to dance the tango properly, whose complicated steps, heady swoops and swooning falls led so logically in the fifties to rock and roll.
Now Libin took Alik’s place with Nina. He stepped out jerkily, twisting and turning, but he didn’t have the necessary artistic languor to give the tango its special aroma. The black saxophonist fancied pale Faika, and she felt torn: like most Russian emigrés she was a racist, yet the man before her was one undoubtedly American product she hadn’t yet tried.
The party slowly came to life. Those who were offended left. Berman and Gioia left too. Both had made their decision but were unsure if it was the right one. Gioia was shaking with nerves, terrified that she would become hysterical when the moment came. But everything happened beautifully, and by morning each realized that they hadn’t lived all these years alone in vain.
Shortly after ten o’clock the landlord came back, accompanied by a flustered Claude. He had informed his boss of his tenant’s death, and after waiting a couple of days, leaving what he considered to be a decent interval, the man arrived to inform Nina that the apartment was to be vacated on the first of the month.
When he came up to her to hand over the document in person, she mistook him for someone else. Kissing him she told him in Russian to find himself a glass, and absent-mindedly dropped the letter on the table, from where it fell to the floor. It didn’t occur to her to pick it up. The disgruntled landlord shrugged and left; Claude tried in vain to persuade him that he was present at a traditional Russian wake.
Someone put on an old tape, a humorous version of a Moscow jazz hit from the late fifties:
Moscow, Kaluga, Los Angeles
Joined in a big collective farm
On the hundredth floor in St Louis
Russian Vanya plays a riff …
Everyone smiled at this old music, Americans and Russians alike, but it meant much more to the Russians: because of it they had been attacked at meetings, expelled from schools and colleges. Faika tried to explain all this to her partner the saxophonist, but she couldn’t find the right words; how could you explain it, when everything was so sad? Suddenly, a sort of hilarity would break through, something sweet, a kind of physical joy, yet their hearts were still heavy with sadness. This was what drove them on.
Lyuda already felt so much at home in this place that after a few drinks she forgot where she was and jumped up to run over to her neighbour Tomochka to pour her heart out, forgetting that Sredne-Tishinsky Street wasn’t around the corner.