“No need to shout,” Maria Ignatevna’s eyebrowless face furrowed. “I’m going home soon anyway. My bit of paper’s used up.” (By this she meant her long-expired visa, but she could never remember a single foreign word.) “The paper’s used up. In a couple of days I’m leaving, they’ve already punched my ticket. You must fetch the priest, otherwise I shall give up on him. If you do, I’ll work with him, Nina, one way or another, even from back there. If not, there’s no hope.” She flung up her arms melodramatically.
“I can’t do anything, he doesn’t want it. He just laughs. Fine, he says, let your God take me, as I am unaffiliated with any party.” Nina bowed her frail little head.
Maria Ignatevna opened her eyes wide. “What’s wrong with you, girl? What does the good Lord care about the party?”
Nina waved dismissively and gulped the rest of her drink.
Maria Ignatevna poured herself more tea. “I’m sorry for you Nina, I really am. Our Lord has many mansions. I’ve seen lots of good people, even Jews, all sorts. He has a place for all of them. Take my Konstantin, may he rest in peace. He was baptized, and now he’s waiting for me where all should be. I’m no saint, I lived with him for only two years and I was widowed at twenty-one. I 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 was one 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 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 slithered into 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
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. Thousands of 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.