Sodden sheets piled up, which Faika collected and took to the laundry on the corner. Nina dreamed in a chair in the studio, glass in hand. Libin fussed unsuccessfully with the air-conditioner; he didn’t have the bracing slat he needed, and in the usual Russian way he was trying to make a short one out of two long ones so he wouldn’t have to go home for the tools he had forgotten to bring with him.
FOUR
But he didn’t.
She lay down beside him, covering his angular shoulder with her hair. He seemed to be asleep. His breathing was shallow and irregular. She listened closely. Without opening his eyes he said, “When will this damned heat end?”
She jumped up and ran to the corner of the room, where Libin had arranged Maria Ignatevna’s herbal masterpieces in seven bottles on the floor. Taking the smallest one and removing the cork, she pushed it under Alik’s nose. It smelt of ammonia.
“Better? Is that better?” she asked urgently.
“A bit,” he agreed.
She lay down beside him again, turned his head to face her and whispered in his ear: “Alik, do it for me, please, I beg you.”
“Do what?” He didn’t understand, or pretended not to.
“Get baptized, and everything will be all right. And the medicine will work.” She took his weak hand in both of hers and gently kissed his freckled fingers. “And you won’t be afraid.”
“But I’m not afraid, my darling.”
“So I can fetch the priest?”
Alik focused his wandering gaze and said, unexpectedly seriously: “Nina, I have no objection to your Jesus. I quite like him in fact, although his sense of humour isn’t all it could be. The thing is, I’m a clever Jew myself. There’s something silly about these sacraments. It’s theatre, and I don’t like theatre. I prefer the cinema. Leave me alone, Bunny rabbit.”
Nina clasped her thin fingers together and waved them at him as though praying. “Please, won’t you just talk to him? Let him come, you can talk.”
“Let who come?” asked Alik.
“The priest of course. He’s a very, very good man. I’m begging you …” Slowly she licked Alik’s neck and his collarbone, then the nipple stuck to his ribcage, in a familiar inviting gesture they both understood. She was seducing him into baptism, turning it into an erotic game.
He smiled weakly at her. “Go on then, call your priest. Only on one condition: you must call a rabbi too.”
Nina was nonplussed. “Are you joking?”
“Why should I joke? If you want me to take this serious step I’ve the right to a second opinion.” Alik always knew how to derive the maximum pleasure from every situation.
But Nina was satisfied. “He agreed, he agreed!” she said to herself. “He’ll be baptized.”
Everything had been arranged in advance with the priest at Nina’s little Orthodox church. An educated man, descended from emigrés who had fled the 1917 revolution, Father Victor had a complicated life-story and a simple faith. He was a sociable, humorous character who liked to drink and was always happy to visit his parishioners.
Where rabbis were to be found, Nina had no idea. Their circle of Jewish friends had no connections with the religious community, and she would have to devote much effort to finding one if these were Alik’s terms.
For the next two hours she busied herself with her bottles, putting more compresses on Alik’s feet and rubbing his chest with an acrid-smelling infusion. It was three in the morning when she remembered Irina laughing as she told them she must be the only one of them who knew how to cook gefilte fish, because she had once been married to a proper Jew who kept kosher and the Sabbath and the rest of it.
She dialled Irina’s number.
When Irina received Nina’s call in the middle of the night, she froze; it’s over, she thought.
“Listen, Ira, was your husband a religious Jew?” Nina’s wild voice demanded through the mouthpiece.
She must be drunk, Irina thought.
“He certainly was,” she replied.
“Could you get hold of him for me please? Alik needs a rabbi.”
No, she’s just mad, Irina decided.
“We’ll talk about it tomorrow,” she said carefully. “It’s three in the morning, I’m not phoning anyone at this hour!”
“Please Irina, it’s important,” Nina said in a completely clear voice.
“I’ll come round tomorrow, okay?” Irina said, hanging up.
Irina had felt a deep curiosity about Nina. This may have been the real reason she agreed to go to Alik’s studio one-and-a-half years ago, to see for herself this miracle in feathers that had got him.
Since the day he was born, women had always adored Alik. At kindergarten he was his teachers’ pet. Later at school, all the girls would invite him to their birthday parties and would fall in love with him, along with their grandmothers and their grandmothers’ dogs. In his teenage years, when people are driven crazy with impatience for adult life to begin, and good little girls and boys rush into ridiculous adventures, Alik was indispensable: he listened to his friends’ confessions and was able to laugh at them and make them laugh at themselves. But his most rare and precious quality was his confidence that life would begin next Monday and that yesterday could be erased, especially if it hadn’t been totally successful. At the School of Performing Arts, where he was a student, even the inspector of his course, known as Snake Venom, proved susceptible to his charms. Four times he was expelled, and three times, thanks to her efforts, he was taken back.
Nina struck Irina at their first meeting as a silly woman, stuck-up and capricious. Before her in the studio she saw a faded beauty seated on a dirty white carpet, doing a giant jigsaw puzzle and asking not to be disturbed. On closer acquaintance she turned out to be merely simple-minded, and psychologically unbalanced too; inertia alternated with hysteria, bouts of joy with melancholy.
She understood why Alik had married her, but he had obviously had to put up with years of her mind-numbing silliness, pathological laziness and muddle. Irina felt not so much retrospective jealousy as a deep sense of puzzlement. She had never come across Nina’s type before. Her infinite helplessness clearly aroused in others, particularly men, feelings of heightened responsibility. She had another trait too: each of her whims, caprices and weaknesses she took to the limit. For instance, she refused to touch money, so that if Alik went to Washington for a week he would have to fill the fridge with food before he left, knowing that she wouldn’t go to the store and would rather starve than handle filthy banknotes. As well as this Nina never cooked, because she was afraid of fire. In Russia she had been keen on astrology, and had read that as a Libra she was in danger from fire. From then on she never went near the stove, fearful of the cosmic incompatibility of the air and fire elements. Here in Alik’s studio, where the stove was not gas but electric, and the only living flame she ever came into contact with was at the end of a match, her aversion to cooking remained as strong as ever, and Alik learned to be a successful and imaginative cook.
Apart from money and fire there was something else, something more intangible, an insane, senseless fear of making decisions. The more insignificant the decision, the more Nina anguished over it. Irina once received some free opera tickets from a client who was a singer, and at Maika’s request they invited Alik and Nina along. They arrived to pick them up and witnessed Nina’s indecision as she tried on endless little black dresses and smart shoes, finally flinging herself on the bed, sobbing into the pillow and refusing to go, until Alik, avoiding the eyes of the involuntary onlookers, picked a dress at random and said: “Wear this one Nina, velvet and the opera go together like beer and sausages.”